Movie sound problem on A200

[hugo furst]

Steve, and everyone - thanks for the input

Well, I emailed KM UK support and got a reply back asking me to parcel the camera up and return it to them with a full description of the "developed fault" !...as I pointed out, it hadn't developed, it was there when the camera wasput in the box in their factory, and no way am I doing that with a day old camera.

Their attitude was kind of "well yeah, we tested the clip you mailed us and there was some clicking, but it reduces if you alter the settings around a bit" - but why should the buyer be limited to using only reduced settings, and why should anyone have to resort to running their clips through various software packages to rectify a problem that should not have been allowed to pass unnoticed by KM's quality people - for the price of the A200, you would expect a fully functional product.

In fairness, they got back to me today, seeing my point of view, and asking me to take it back to the shop - so that's my next step, tomorrow -only glad I didn't buyit over the internet.

Updates to follow - and, just wondering out of interest ref the posts from other A200 users, how long did this problem take to manifest it's self ?

thanks

Ted

[stk]

Hi Ted,

Judging by the posts, my feeling is that the noise and delayaren'tfaults thatdevelop,they arejust weak areasin the design.

I think the delay is a problem with design, but it seems to have been right back from the earlier K-M models.
I suspect the clicking is simply noise coupling. Before I got the A200(which now I'm used to it am really pleased with - including video) I had a Fuji 7000 for a few weeks. This actually disabled focussing and zoom completely for video due to motor noise coupling to the microphone. There was no flexibility at all. With the A200 of course the zoom is silent and I can live fine with manual focus. In fact in my case auto focus at telephoto can hunt all over the place indoors! I exchanged the Fuji for the A200 for a continuous lockup fault and the image quality is much better in my opinion.

My suspicion is the replacement will be similar, I suggest you try it in the shop. K-M support also asked me to exchange my A200 due to this video focus in telephoto indoors and the new one is the same as the first. But, I've found manual focus is fine anyway for video now I've got the hang of it.

Hopefully you'll get a solution that you arehappy with.

Cheers
Steve

[hugo furst]

Hi Steve

I was aware of the zoom = noise issue on the A200 from reading this and other forums, but the problem with my camera is that the noise appears to be nothing to do with zoom at all, as I ran my first few clips without zooming - and it's as noisy as anything.

I've downloaded a few clips from other users posts on here and they are a 1000 times better sound quality than mine.

Anyway, we'll see tomorrow

thanks,

Ted :?

[stk]

Hi Ted,

Does sound like yours is worse than normal.

By the way, do you mean focus or zoom? I believe zoom should be noise free as it's manual via the barrel. Auto Focus and Anti Shake are the ones that give me motor noise. (unfortunately I can't check as my wife has the camera at the moment!)

Let us know how you get on

Cheers
Steve

[hugo furst]

Steve, I think you may have given me food for thought there -

I shot my clips without zoom, but had autofocus and antishake on - will try again without, before I go back to the shop.



thanks

Ted

[ufx]

I also have received a reply from the dutch KM servicedesk about the audiodelay:

---
Depending on MultiMedia Card / SD Card models, this model may prevent an entire movie clip from being recorded regardless of free space on the memory card, due to restriction of writing speed from the camera to the memory card. We would recommend to use a SD Card of 10MB/sec transfer speed in movie recording at frame rate of 30frames/sec with movie clip size of either 640*480 or 320*240 pixels.
---

However, this is the description from the DiMAGE Z1. I've mailed them back to ask where this is described in the A200 manual. The only thing mentioned in the manual is that the recording length is limited with a slower card -- no mention about audio delay..

[hugo furst]

Took the A200 back today, the shop couldn't have been more helpful - exchanged it straight away with a guarantee that if I still wasn't happy then I could have a full refund.

Thanks to stk Steve's post I managed to pin the noise down to the use of Auto Focus during filming - all other options worked fine - no noise at all, even with AS on...so, even though the KM manual should have mentioned this but didn't, Ive decided to keep the A200 - too good a camera in my price bracket to pass up..and shoot all my movies on manual focus and live with it - after all, I did buy thething forstills....but it would have been nice to have all functions noise free.

KM if you read this, please take note for your next new camera.

cheers to all for their input on this, and special thanks to Equipment Express of Altrincham - outstanding customer service.

Ted

[ufx]

A little offtopic, but I would like to say that the great MP4Cam2AVI also works great on linux using the latest Wine.

http://www.winehq.com/

[graywolf2004]

New version of MP4Cam2AVI is available Sorry for long pause, there are too many changes and new features

Sourceforge.net is temporary down, i've uploaded it here:

http://graywolf.nm.ru/MP4Cam2AVI_v1.90.zip

Audio shift for Minolta A200should work fine

VERSION 1.90
* Separate advanced settings window (too many new settings)
* New audio option: volume adjust (for cameras with quite sound)
* New audio option: audio track shift (for cameras with audio lag)
* New audio option: configurable lowpass filter (good for Xacti C1)
* Improved resampling algorithm (cubic spline interpolation with filtering)
* New video option: keyframes slideshow (experimental)
* Avi auto-split (avi size limit option)
* MPEG4 AVC support (experimental)

[graywolf2004]

SourceForge is already up

New version is available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mp4cam2avi