Question about Sony Handycam DCR-PC105E Mini DV Digital Camcorder

Sony DCR PC105E I-link failure; any advice? (Please!)

About 18 months ago I bought my first camcorder, a Sony DCR PC105e. In many respects it is excellent – great movie and still image quality, easy to use, has a few cool FX features. I liked it so much that I splurged and got two lens adaptors (wide-angle and telephoto). BUT.. after apx. 10 months of occasional use, I was suddenly unable to export the video to my PC (Windows XP SP1, apx. 2.4 ghz pentium, 1,024 mb RAM, apx 120 GB harddrive) via firewire, or “I-link”, or whatver it’s called. Previously I had been able to, using a firewire cable and Ulead Video 7 software. It was very easy. Worked fine for about 7 hours of use scattered over 10 months. Then one day the PC just stopped recognizing the Sony. I tried many things, including uninstalling and re-installing Ulead and the Sony drivers, using other video software (Arcsoft and Magix, to name but 2) and installing a new firewire card. To no avail. The PC won’t recognize the Sony any more. All software packages report something along the lines of “No video source detected”. My PC works fine with other firewire devoices (like a DVD writer, and an external hard-drive), but not with the Sony. The same is true of my laptop, so fingers increasingly point to the Sony – especially as a Google search reveals exactly the same problem with exactly the same Sony model. Unfortunately these compalints, posted on various forums, are a bit old (2003-4) and crucially don’t say how things turned out in the end. It is still possible to transfer video to the PC via UBS and Sony’s ImageTransfer 1.5 software, but the image quality is very poor. Why bother to include a Carl Zeiss lens when the exporting leaves your images looking like crap on the PC or DVD you burn? Sony has not been helpful – they have been totally unresponsive to my e-mails. This is not a “hate Sony” posting (although they have alienated me). Rather, it’s a request for advice. I see my options – which I’d ask forum members to comment on / add to as they fit --as follows: a) try to find a mini DV player with a firewire connection so I can shoot with the Sony and transfer to the PC with the player. Problem is, the few players I’ve heard of cost much more than most camcorders. b) Buy the cheapest camcorder with firewire connectivity which I can find, and use this to feed Sony-shot video into the PC. c) Try an analogue-to-digital converter like Dazzle – though this raises questions; for example, although the image quality when I plug the Sony (via its analogue outs) straight into the TV is excellent, will it be as excellent once it’s gone through this converter? Ultimately I want to load in AVI files so I can edit and apply FX without image degradation. I’d be grateful for any suggestions members might offer. I’ve got 10 hours of raw footage (which probably would boil down into about 45 minutes of very cool footage) accumulating, but can’t edit any of it! Lastly, please go easy with jargon as I am a newby.

3 Answers

Anonymous

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473 Answers

Ideas.. 1. Is the camera set the same as before during capture? 2. Does the camera work on another PC or Mac? 3. Look up WinDV on google.com and see if that works. (It's free.)

Posted on Sep 14, 2005

Anonymous

I had this problem myself for a long time, but finally solved it by downloading a firewire patch from the windows website which 'woke up' my firewire connection, and i never had any difficulty from then onwards.

Posted on Nov 16, 2007

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May be unfixable I have researched this issue fairly extensively because a friend of mine had this same problem with his Sony. It appears that some Sony camcorders just fail either from the beginning or after a while to be recognized through the firewire connection. Sony apparently has provided no solutions to this issue and seems to be ignoring the problem entirely. My friend got his to work briefly by buying another firewire cable. The camera was recognized and he was able to transfer video. But only once! It then completely stopped working again! You might want to try another cable and see if you have better luck.

Posted on Sep 14, 2005