Picture breakup on Panasonic DMR E55

[kevlar69]

I bought the above player last weekend but hardly used it this week as I was waiting for some dvd ram discs to come I ordered on the net. The discs are Datasafe 9.4g in caddies. Yesterday I recorded 1 hour in LP mode, 2 episodes of the simpsons. Started watching the recording last night and halfway through the first episode the picture started blocking up badly, like a poor downloaded movie clip. I haven't investigated this further yet, could be a dirty disc ( shouldn't be as disc in caddy ), could be poor quality media or compatibility. Maybe even the E55!.

What do you think?

Kevlar

[Mechworker]

I had the same thing happen to me with an E50 about two months ago.

It was the second day of it being on the job, and I was recording some stuff on Memorex (yuck) disks. I didn't know that Memorex sucked at that time...

Anyway, I was trying to bring over a show I'd taped off of TV when the reception was bad, and it seemed to work alright on the RAM disk I had.

However, I noticed that the thing went all blocky on me when I tried a conventional DVD-r.

I have heard that if a signal is really noisy, then it will sometimes break up on recording. However, I don't understand why the RAM would do the job but the -R wouldn't. On top of that, I thought it might be the media, since the unit went into a recover shortly thereafter.

However, I think it was actually the E50. I tried several disks after that and they all blew up the same, and then the unit wouldn't even record off of TV!

You and I might both have got bad units, I'm afraid. I took mine back, and told the salesman what happened. He said he'd never heard of such a thing, but he did give me a replacement.

Don't spend time screwing around. Go get a replacement for your unit and see if the same thing happens again.

This is one of the reasons I still TAPE everything I want off TV. I've never seen a tape go all blocky. Then, when I want something for good, I can transfer it to disk.

[kevlar69]

Thanks for the reply m8. I've just erased the recording and tried recording/playing back the recording at the same time in XP mode as this will cover the whole disc in 1 hour, and guess what? after about 5 minutes it went tits up all blocking etc. I pulled the caddy out, slid the cover accross and slowly turning the disc I found a blob of fluff on the disc, like a little bit of felt. I removed this and am now trying again, hopefully will be ok. The question remains though how did it get on a brand new disc in a caddy? I haven't seen a bit of fluff/dirt that big on a bare disc!

One observation though, have you seen the surface of a ram disc? wow....I can see why they cost at least 10 times more than a dvd-r.

Kevlar

[Mechworker]

On my unit, I was using standard -R disks, no caddy at all.

I've never even seen a disk in a caddy, although there's a line drawing of one in the E50's manual.

Weird about the fluff. I didn't have that problem, mine just crapped out.

Best of luck, man, and let me know how it goes!

[handyguy]

My panasonic came with a panasonic dvdram which works perfectly. I use Accu dvd-rs with 100% success.

Always test with the manf's media.

dvdram has a rewrite rate of 100,000 times....

[kevlar69]

I written a lot of movies to dvd-r on my pc, the best discs being anything with the dark purple Ritek dye. I there a preferred brand when it comes to Ram discs?

Kevlar

[wingnut]

Morning,

hmm, stranger and stranger. If you take a look at my thread here https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=207885&highlight= you'll see I had almost exactly the same problem with an E50 following the return of which I'm currently waiting to take delivery of a new E55 unit.

Anyone else had this sort of problem, could it be a defect in the lens / optics unit or a problem that has occured due to the use of datasafe DVD RAM disks ?

Also are you both in the UK, the US or elsewhere ? I'm in the UK but wonder could it be a batch or a predictable fault on the E50 and early E55 units ?


Hmmmm...

Cheers

Edz

[Mechworker]

I'm in Canada. (I'm a colonial to you guys I guess, eh?)

This is a bit worrisome, although my current E50 is doing well. I've put almost 300 hours of recording on it now, so far so good.

I've also been having a problem with my RV31 unit that I use for playback. A few times now it has been suffering picture dropout. I'll be watching something, and it will just go black.

Sometimes, it gets really dark and looks Macrovision-y, but that's not the problem because it does it on commercially pressed disks too!

Any problems like that out there?