Hi,
I've been playing with a suspect MD80 and found some issues that folks might find useful.
Charging: It seems that the USB port and the cable you use can effect the amount and time a charge takes.
At work, the charging time is reduced. Could be the USB port on the PC, but I suspect the cable is more suspect: The cable supplied with my working MD80 will fully charge in under 1.5 hours. Using a USB adaptor like one of these at work, it'll charge in well under and hour.
Using a USB camera cable (the type with a 'barrel' device in-line) will appear to charge quickly - blue light becomes constant - but the MD80 only ran for 30 minutes. Fully charged it again on the camera cable, then plugged it into the original cable, and it charged for nearly another hour - ending up with a decent running time.
File Space: Found an odd issue with the MD80 running out of power while recording.
On occasion, when the power ran out, the device didn't have enough time to save the file properly. This seems to happen with large files after a long record, rather than with small ones. I guess the power dies before it manages to save it down fully. In these cases, there is either no corresponding AVI file - or there is but it's only 0 bytes in size.
HOWEVER... If you plug the MD80 into a PC and look at the 'disc' properties, it will report that 'x' amount of the SD card is used - even though it appears empty. I had the mD80 die after 30 minutes recording: there was a 0 byte AVI file but the properties showed 1.5 GB used.
This may seriously effect your camera's capacity. The solution is a full or a quick format. It's probably an issue with the FAT file system (I searched for hidden files but couldn't find any).
As an aside, I noticed that if I FULLY formatted the SD card on my PC, then about 300MB of a 4GB card is not available (marked as used). Not sure why - possibly a large default file allocation table? However, if I formatted the card in my Nokia phone, then I only lost about 200KB. I did end up with a load of default folders auto-created, but I could either delete these or 'quick format' on the PC which does not rewrite the allocation table and didn't effect the available space (of course, there was no need to actually delete these superfluous folders as they don't effect the operation of the camera).
Anyway - something to think about before the commute home
I've been playing with a suspect MD80 and found some issues that folks might find useful.
Charging: It seems that the USB port and the cable you use can effect the amount and time a charge takes.
At work, the charging time is reduced. Could be the USB port on the PC, but I suspect the cable is more suspect: The cable supplied with my working MD80 will fully charge in under 1.5 hours. Using a USB adaptor like one of these at work, it'll charge in well under and hour.
Using a USB camera cable (the type with a 'barrel' device in-line) will appear to charge quickly - blue light becomes constant - but the MD80 only ran for 30 minutes. Fully charged it again on the camera cable, then plugged it into the original cable, and it charged for nearly another hour - ending up with a decent running time.
File Space: Found an odd issue with the MD80 running out of power while recording.
On occasion, when the power ran out, the device didn't have enough time to save the file properly. This seems to happen with large files after a long record, rather than with small ones. I guess the power dies before it manages to save it down fully. In these cases, there is either no corresponding AVI file - or there is but it's only 0 bytes in size.
HOWEVER... If you plug the MD80 into a PC and look at the 'disc' properties, it will report that 'x' amount of the SD card is used - even though it appears empty. I had the mD80 die after 30 minutes recording: there was a 0 byte AVI file but the properties showed 1.5 GB used.
This may seriously effect your camera's capacity. The solution is a full or a quick format. It's probably an issue with the FAT file system (I searched for hidden files but couldn't find any).
As an aside, I noticed that if I FULLY formatted the SD card on my PC, then about 300MB of a 4GB card is not available (marked as used). Not sure why - possibly a large default file allocation table? However, if I formatted the card in my Nokia phone, then I only lost about 200KB. I did end up with a load of default folders auto-created, but I could either delete these or 'quick format' on the PC which does not rewrite the allocation table and didn't effect the available space (of course, there was no need to actually delete these superfluous folders as they don't effect the operation of the camera).
Anyway - something to think about before the commute home
