egafd.com

Myson,

Certainly you have made a valid comment about the heads getting clogged from tape deposits and cleaning.

Perhaps wrongly I assumed as a professional user the OP has a head cleaner tape and maybe cleaning swabs ( NOT cotton buds ) and Isopropyl Alcohol.

Maybe I'm ' old school ' but I trust tape rather than memory cards. With tape if a glitch maybe a few seconds of footage is lost but if a card goes corrupt everything is lost.

When using cards I totally agree with your comment stating the importance to make archive copies of the raw recorded files. I use DVD-R rather than Hard drive so if a failure only one disc is lost and they can't accidentally be deleted / overwritten / formatted either.

Thanks guys... yeah I regually clean the tape heads I will look into the Compact Flash option... but I do like Tape...

I think the best option is indeed to buy a decent back up, would be good to have 2 camera anyways...

A few thoughts on this...

When I bought my old Sony PD150 a decade ago, the broadcast dealer I bought it from told me not to bother getting it serviced, that it would go on for ages and I should just get it fixed when it developed a fault. They were right and it kept going strong despite very regular use until the heads & switch finally died a couple of years ago. So it lasted about twice as long as your Z5 has so far.

I got the parts replaced by http://www.digiservice.co.uk/ in north west London who mostly fix consumer stuff including TVs but they have one guy who is a guru on pro camcorders. He can diagnose faults over the phone and knows what the necessary parts will cost off the top of his head. If you do decide to go for a preventative service, he'd charge a fraction of the price Sony quoted.

The heads are the most likely thing to go first and Terry and Myson both suggested using an external card reader so that you're bypassing them, but of course sod's law means that some other feature could fail first.

The final option is that second camera, which would realistically be card-based nowadays.

I now shoot on SxS cards* and it's so much easier having the footage there straightaway in FCP as soon as I plug the card in my laptop. I wouldn't dream of going back to tape and all that capturing frustration. Cards are another world.

---
* I now use a Sony PMW-350 which I highly recommend if you have 15 grand to spare. At the risk of stating the obvious, I'm not completely mad and bought that mostly for broadcast non-adult work. There are lots of good lowish cost card-based cameras nowadays.

Seeing as they want ?700+ for servicing a HDV camera, I assume (as others have said) that it will be largely for the tape mechanism.

Myson did suggest you consider the Sony HVR-MRC1K Compact Flash unit.
However, I have another suggestions:

The Z5 has HDMI ports - which actually output a precompressed (I believe) 1920x1080 4:2:2 signal; whereas the tape, and the HVR-MRC1K Compact Flash unit, record a HDV compliant 1440x1080 4:2:0 MPEG-2 stream.

So, you could use another 'external' recorder, which will take a feed from the HDMI port - I do appreciate that this will another thing to deal with, rather than just sticking a tape in and pressing record. There's two reasonably priced options that spring to mind:
Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle - A few hundered quid (near-ish to ?300) but needs to record to a SSD (not supplied) to allow recording in Uncompressed (best quality but HUGE, let me repeat, HUGE files), DNxHD or ProRes (the latter both near loss-less codecs)

Atomos Ninja - which again allows recording to SSD (or even hard-drive, if compatible) in the ProRes codec.

This looks interesting - bypass the tape side - http://www.videomaker.com/article/15243

Paul

Sort of what I was recommending....but with the Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle or Atomos Ninja (or Samuari - if you have SDI outs), you get:

1920x1080 instead of (the HDV resolution of) 1440x1080

4:2:2 instead of 4:2:0 (hence less colourspace compression)

Better codecs - either Uncompressed (if you have the Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle and can live with HUGE files) or DNxHD/ProRes near-lossless codecs (more bitrate, and yes bigger files, but more 'room' when color correcting and grading)

Thanks again I will take a look, even though I have to say a lot of that sounded chinese due to me being totally "untechie" lol But will defo have a look, appreciate the time people are taking to give such good solid input