Noisy motor HV10

[rhubarbe]

Sigh. This morning when I came to to some shooting in our office, and having switched off all our printers (we do video mystery shopping), we could clearly hear the motor noise of the cam while it was in the hide (in this case we tried it in a briefcase (we couldn't hear it) and ladies' handbag (we could hear it) and in a coat pocket (a cold August has at least one benefit at last). In the coat pocket it sounds like two bluebottles fighting in an empty jam-jar.

Can anybody with experience of either this model, or tape cams in general, tell me if I have been simply unlucky, and swapping it out for another might get me a quieter one (though equally, it might get me a noisier one)? The seller is quite happy to refund me.

[rhubarbe]

Can it be influenced by the make of tape? Maybe if I used a better quality tape than the Sony Premium it might have an effect on the noise?

I did wind the tape through and back before starting to use it.

Any ideas, anybody? I really don;t want to send it back.

EDIT: Booked an RMA.

[chrishull3]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

Can it be influenced by the make of tape? Maybe if I used a better quality tape than the Sony Premium it might have an effect on the noise?

I did wind the tape through and back before starting to use it.

Any ideas, anybody? I really don;t want to send it back.

EDIT: Booked an RMA.

firstly i do not think the tape [sony premium]comes into this.never having used your model i cant say how noisy they are but most small cams are fairly noisy,i used a interface mike with my sony hc-1 and the onboard mike on my fx-7 is far from perfect so i use a rode stereo mike with it.chris

[rhubarbe]

Thanks but the trouble is that it doesn't have a mic input, so you are limited to the onboard mic. Now, I know I can turn it down but it's already as low as I can take it without losing audio from the subjects (usually people I am filming), so I guess that if all tape cams are the same in terms of noise output from the motor I shall reluctantly have to backtrack to a memory stick camcorder which has no motor.

Maybe AVCHD is harder to edit than tape, but its unitary, clip by clip, all saved as separate files nature, obviates the need for much editing that I'd need to do with a linear tape, and I'd not need to spend ages editing out motor noise from quiet scenes.