Selection of Sony fixes and updates here compiled from the engineering board at www.sonysupport.com

Or go to www.sonysupport.com search for f900 and ask yourself, does the f900 camera that you are using have these fixes installed? or is your service center or dealer waiting for the fault to occur on your camera before spending their time and money on a warranty claim? Yet some of the fixes are simple and can prevent a mishap occurring. Check the camera you are using!

Camera dies and fan runs at high speed. A IC chip blown, caused by? Once fixed, if boards are not properly seated the symptom may be the same! The fan is very loud and viewfinder and camera are dead, hard to miss.

Fan running at High Speed is also an indicator of more than 18 volts being present. Disconnect power supply immediately to prevent damage.

Recorder output dies. RF warning activates. Possible causes are dodgy connector or ribboon cable but this is not conclusive.

Hexagonal arrangement of Green Flare around pin points of light. This has been fixed in mark 2 and "H" cameras with a different optical block. It is not fixed by the Mark 3 upgrade package.

Noise in blacks Improved in mark 3 camera and upgrade, should be cleaner than mark 1. Check what db level has been programmed into low medium and high settings.

Camera handle fell off The handle will not take the strain for a fully loaded f900 (6x6 matt box, heavy lens, remote focus ect) and can be torn away from the body of if the camera is snatched.

Backfocus issues This site deals with f900s only not Panavisied f900s. However backfocus can drift in the following ways on f900. If camera is tilted down for more than 20 minutes or so the weight of lens matt box ect can cause a shift in backfocus. Extremes of temperature can cause backfocus drift. Also check back focus alignment with each filter in filter wheel.

Green flashes Caused by intermittent connection on a genlock cable. The green lines get recorded on tape without any warning. Also it is hard to spot on location.

White Flashes in picture Can be caused by operator changing menu settings whilst recording.

DCC was off now it is on After loading a memory stick the DCC and gain switch may not be indicative of actually setting. So move switch back and then forward to your desired selection.

Rear mount fell off The small rear collar on the bottom of the camera gets abused in a number of ways. If using a Arri baseplate thin washers are added to increase the height of the collar. The threads can easily become stripped resulting in the collar falling off.

Timecode offset between camera and separate system sound recorder When the F900 camera powers down or you changes batteries you must jam sync time-code again. For what ever reason the time code drifts at shut down and may introduce a 6 frame offset between remote sound recording device and picture time code.

Miranda MDC 700 down convertor is affected by heat cold and temperatures in-between. The YPBPR loop through can cause a colour cast. When the unit gets hot it sometimes does not work, Note that the new models are DVC800 amd MDC900/920 and are more reliable.

On screen motion is blurred. Check that the shutter is switched on. Bear in mind clear scan function can enable exposures below 1/48th second.

Flickering highlights when 1/250th sec shutter selected. Fault presents itself in progressive mode not interlace. This is a set fault from the factory that is difficult for a engineer to rectify. Software update v2.02 will introduce a means of enabling local engineers to fix the problem. Check your camera now to see if highlights flicker when shutter is selected. Most noticeable in progressive mode.

White speckles can appear on recording if the connection between vtr and camera is loose. It is not uncommon for this to happen in transit.

White Specks also caused by cosmic radiation. These can ben seen in the viewfinder by setting viewfinder control as normal, capping lesn It may take a minute or so to see white specks that appear for a frame. These do get recorded to tape. SOny say this is cosmic radition hitting individual pixels.

Viewfinder mount breaks. It is designed to break rather than wreck the viewfinder. If you are trekking take a spare.

Solarisation in Rich colours. If a deep blue/purple light, like an out-of-focus neon tube, looks solarized, with a dark band in the center instead of a white band, it's due to chroma clipping and will probably go away if you turn off the commonly used ITU-709 preset of the Color Matrix.

Over saturated colours in neon. Check the knee sat function. Designed to improve skin tone highlights it gets fooled by neon. Can be considered a creative tool as well as having potential for a "stitch up". It adds colour to highlight areas

RMB750 Remote While the new RMP750 Remote controller is a "terrific addition to the product line", it needs several fixes to utilize the latest features in /3 version of the F900; it neither allows the saturation control to be turned on or adjusted, and it will not access the twenty groups of five scene files. Note that it is not possible to change frame rate from the RMB remote. A software upgrade fixes the problem of the RMB cycling on and off when connected to the f900.

Saturation control in the /3 version, apparently when you do turn it on in the camera menu it adjusts the color bar saturation in effect negating its usefulness; this needs to be addressed with a software fix, and while they're at it, it would also increase the feature's usefulness if the adjustment were fixed to allow increase as well as reduction of the overall color saturation; now it just allows decrease.

Cassette Jams. Parts of the cassette mechanism have been upgraded. This is a user payable fix.

RMB 750 Remote Another feature which should be added to the main menu is the "standard" reset which is on the RMB-750 remote controller, because if the camera was last used with the remote controller and not "standardized" upon wrap, the settings left in their remain and while the operator who uses the camera next might think the camera is in it's standard mode, it is not. There should therefore be a standard reset in the camera menu. Note that some controls from the RMB are only displayed on the viewfinder.

Lines appear when shooting strobes. Horizontal lines (every second line) have been seen under some circumstances when shooting at 23.98p 1/48th second and recording flashes from a strobe light. No answer yet to what causes this effect or indeed if it is a camera induced problem.

Flicker on helicopter nose mount A user reports that two out of his three f900s record a flicker on a helicopter nose mount. Described as a black line similar to shooting the rotors. It seems to be vibration induced (at frequency of 7 to 14hz) he has not been able to rectify it. He does a short test flight with tight turns, powers down aircraft and replays to check picture. Does not happen with these cameras at high speed on camera cars. Airflow through camera body lifting tape from heads has also been eliminated as the cause.

Note That Mark 3 Upgrade reverses detail frequency number. So +99 was a small detail line now it is the widest detail line.

Rotary Encoder like Digibeta cameras these encoder knobs wear out. The symptom is that the menu curser moves erratically.

Large number of dead pixels appear. This is as though the RAM memory that stores the correction data for dead pixels becomes corrupted. Normal black balance correction procedure does not work.

Can't turn off camera. If the battery is low then sometimes it is not possible to stop rolling.

Corrupted frames. LTC is clean but vitc and picture is corrupted. The cause of this is unknow, but probably a rare but worrying recording fault. Worrying as RF warning did not activate. If working on a NLE try laying the tape back to the vtr, or if you have sdti try making a clone.

Camera flashing "Very infrequently when I go into the menu, it starts flashing the camera on and off. Switching back off the menu settles the camera back down. A fix is to set the menu switch and the display switch to off, then hold the menu wheel down while push the menu switch up and the display switch to on."

Cinegamma Curves. Beware that some DIY cinegamma curves can interact adversly with knee saturation control, creating coloured posturised effect in highlights that can only been seen on a colour montor.

Rushes look a little soft. Not exactly a camera problem but the camera can get the blame. First of all check that you are looking at rushes and not a copy. Although clones are aften requested for insurance purposes mistakes are made in dubbing where a copy is made, rather than a clone. A copy is noiser and a little softer than the original. A clone maintains original camera quality. CLones are made by using SDTI feature on HDCAM and DVCPROHD.

Assignable switch. Beware when enabling assignable switch to select +gain. There is incorrect dispaly of gain in viewfinder when assignment switch is selected to on. The viewfinder display only dispalys gain setting as selected by the switch on body of camera. So although viewfinder displays gain as 0db camera is set to +9db or +12db. Note this problem has been fixed in f900R model.