Feasability of repairing dead 1394 connector on Sony Dig8 camcorder?

If you connected a 6 pin cable to the camera or PC port while the camera is on their is a risk of blowing the IEEE port on the camera. The 6 pin plug runs an active power lead and any mis-alignment might get the volts onto the wrong pin and poooooffffff! Sony charges like a roaring bull to replace a card. Alternatively it might still be just the cable. Borrow a known good one and try it.

Usually the camera end is 4-pin, and there should never be any power there, absent an internal short at the 6-pin end - which might not even have 6 pins in the shell, for all I know. OK, just looked at one - it does have six pins at the big end.

FWIW, the RS-232 spec explicitly states that the interface electronics will be immune to any short-circuit or misconnection of the pins. I have no idea if USB and FireWire have such a provision, but it *would* be nice.

If you squeezed the cable a wee bit too hard and closed up one of the female connector pins a trifle too far, inserting the plug may have driven the corresponding pin in the socket backwards far enough to not make contact. If so, you may be able to get to the back of the socket and push the pin forward again, but it will be loosened and may never stay in place.

In that case, a new socket would seem to be required.

Colin D.

Can you advise what RS-232 is? What relation does this have to Firewire?

Feasibility even....

Now I'm feeling old...

The standard serial interface, used for modems, printers, mice, and all sorts of other things before USB came along. Has some advantages over USB, like it works fine from one end of a building to the other and you can easily make your own cables, but isn't designed to support hubs with multiple attachments and is relatively slow, especially compared to USB2 Hi-speed.

We lost the Firewire port on two different Canon camcorders, and discussed this with a guy at our best photo store in the area. He claims on the Canon and many other camcorders the 1394 interface is on a daughterboard, and the wires connecting it to the main board are very fragile. We are not sure if this is the problem or not- the day before we noticed the lack of 1394, we had left the cameras in a very hot car trunk for an extended period of time.

He claimed repair on the cheaper Canon would likely be around 200 bucks- the more expensive one (GL2) would be more. Our solution was to buy a 250 buck camcorder to act as a Firewire deck, plus it is another backup camera. We'll take great pains with this one to protect it from both shock and heat.

BTW, we also lost the Firewire connection on the motherboard of our main video editing computer. As far as I am concerned, Firewire does not seem to be very robust as far as hardware is concerned :-(

Doc wrote:

LOL.

Me, too. :)

It doesn't seem that way, does it? It's reasonably common to have a component destroyed by a bad cable or bridge board.

One big issue is loose specs and less than stellar design of the connector itself. It's surprisingly easy to insert a 6-pin connector backwards, and this will almost always blow something, as the power lines get connected to signal. A bad cable can do the same thing;

Since the number of devices actually powered from the FireWire connector is quite small, I've taken to using specialty cables which MAY have 6 pin physical connectors at one or both ends, but never have more than 4 pins or lines actually present. I also (though the interface is rated plug-and-play) no longer connect or disconnect when anything is powered up.

I've had the experience of a bad FireWire-to-ATA bridge board (in an Imation tape drive) taking out three motherboard FireWire circuits before I caught on.

On the plus side, once you get it connected, it works MUCH better than any flavor of USB.

Not to mention that it was often a challenge to get RS-232 to work.

On 12/01/2006, Doc posted this:

Others answered the first question. That you had to ask made them feel old, and to tell the truth, it also makes me feel old :-)

I thought the second was obvious...

OK - I gave an example of a useful property of an older spec and suggested - or at least hoped - that the newer one might, by analogy and good engineering, have the same property.

On 12/01/2006, Doc posted this:

:-)

-- Gene E. Bloch (Gino) letters617blochg3251 (replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")

Baudot TTY anyone?

No need to feel old. All this is still being used by radio-amateurs around the globe, and also commercial-stations like weather-forecast for marine.

apple's firewire is a horror! my maxtor drive with firewire port doesn't recognized at time and I have to turn the drive off - disconnect the cab;e - turn the drive on - reconnect the cable. also, my canon camocorder's firewire port was fired. it was my fault but WHO designed a port that is so fragile?

As a follow-up, I got a close-up look with a magnifier and saw a bent contact inside the port. I ground down the ends of a pair of pointy tweezers so they'd fit in the channel of the contact and a straight pin which I bent the end of to allow me to push down on the contact and managed to manipulate it enough to get it back in line with the other contacts and am now back in business. I also fiddled with the contacts on the cable end to make sure they're as even as I can make them on an eyeball basis, which is to say, straighter than they were out of the box.

As others have mentioned, after having gotten this close look at how it's configured, I'm really surprised how flimsy a design it is. The cable end seems to have way too much ability to wiggle around and inadequate strain relief given how little margin there seems to be for the contacts range of motion. I'm surprised I haven't had problems before this. From now on I'll tape the cable to the body of cam instead of just letting it hang.

Sony's goal is not to get you to keep the same piece of equipment forever.

Yes.... I've had a firewire cable go bad on me. I didn't bother trying to fix it, I just replaced it. You're right. They are flimsy.