That's one tough camcorder!

[jackfalbey]

While shooting a storm-shutter infomercial, I forgot to unhook the XLR cable from my beltpack when I set my PD170 on a table between takes. As you probably have guessed, I walked away and the cable pulled the 5-lb. camera off the table where it fell 4 feet and landed on a concrete floor, hitting first on the battery then bouncing and hitting on the lens hood. In a dead panic I rushed back to see how badly it was broken... other than a scuff on the battery and a scratch on the lens hood, it suffered no damage at all! The only other thing (that I realized later in post) was that the "reset" button somehow got triggered and the rest of the video on that tape had no timecode. There's a reason why the PD170 is so widely used in field journalism, and I proved that the dumb way!

[Bobby]

Gosh, Jack - I knew the outcome because of your title, but my heart was still pounding just reading about it!

Glad it was OK.

[jackfalbey]

Any time a $2500 piece of equipment takes a dive, it's heart-stopping. It's a testament to Sony's engineering of their DSR- line of camcorders that it survived as well as it did.

[Chuck Engels]

Sure glad to hear that everything is ok Jack, what a story

[Steve Grisetti]

Just to confirm, when you say PD170 , you mean the Sony DSR-PD170, right?

If so, that's a great testimony!

My first camcorder, 20 years ago, was a bottom-of-the-line Sony ($700 then). I mounted it on a tripod but didn't lock down the tilt. It took a nose dive -- and, well, that's the reason I got my second camcorder.

So, I'm glad to hear your story ends happily, Jack!

[jackfalbey]

Yep, that's the DSR-PD170. I figured it was "sturdy" when I took it out of the box for the first time and realized the outer shell was metal instead of plastic... but I never intended to drop-test it!