Failing SG9665GC V2?

An open thanks to kamkar1 for the generous offer, but I have more radios than I need or use now. I tend to go too far with my hobbies like that :LOL:

Phil
 
I've skimmed through and haven't seen mention but have you checked the capacitors / supercaps in the camera itself? May be worth a look if not as possibly they're at the end of their lifespan.
 
You presume much- it does have issues but it still plays music although I rarely turn it on these days. There's something loose in the antenna (an easy fix if I were inclined to look into it) and the LCD display is so dim you need a flashlight to see it in the daytime (which is no problem since I've got presets). The front speaker cones in the doors are falling to pieces which after 27 years is to be expected as they are paper. The engine-management computer is probably going bad too (which I'm still sorting out). Any my much newer still-dead minivan has an even worse radio in it along with a couple other electronics issues too.

Nothing lasts forever, especially today's consumer electronics which is no longer simple or made to be as robust as it once may have been made. The wonderful miniaturization of electronics we clamor for has that downside built into it. It's the way of the world whether we like it or not, and if things were all made only to that higher level I couldn't afford them, so maybe it's not so bad an approach after all. It's all in how you see things.

Phil

As I mentioned several posts ago, this isn't about ham radios, home stereos and especially not about your loose antenna, damaged 27 year old speakers, or a dimming LCD display in your ancient van. But FWIW, radios as a general product category tend to be quite reliable actually, especially car radios that survive the temperature extremes, vibrations and shocks of an automotive environment, literally for decades. Frankly though, the notion of conflating dead or dying ham radios or home stereo systems or a funky old car radio with poor dash cam product reliability and quality control is beyond me. It almost feels as if you are attempting to a distract from the original discussion here.

And honestly, I don't know what to make of your statement that, "Nothing lasts forever". Such a comment within the context of the inherently problem prone nature of dash cams is so over-generalized and vague as to be literally meaningless.

The bottom line here is that dash cams as a product category are perhaps the most trouble prone, unreliable electronic devices I have ever encountered, even the better ones. And yet I look around my house and studio and I see numerous electronics products that have provided decades of 100% reliable service and are still in use. None of them have ever required any form of customer service and all have performed flawlessly the whole time. With dash cams, not so much. In fact, thinking about it I don't believe any of the dozens of dash cams I've had hands on experience with have ever been 100% problem free.

As for my assertion about the trouble prone nature of dash cams, I would invite everyone to have a good look around the DashCamTalk forum as a whole. One only has to take a cursory look to see that a vast percentage of the posts to this forum all across the board are complaints about or reports of problems and requests for help and assistance about a wide array of issues ranging from outright hardware failures to video glitches, focus problems, start-up issues, shut-down file saving failures, power supply issues, mounting problems, RFI annoyances, file errors, memory card compatability, cable and plug issues, etc., etc., etc.

Jokiin, Street Guardian USA and Niko have a well deserved reputation for the amazing level of outstanding customer service they provide along with a very generous camera replacement policy (which is built into the price of your SG camera, btw.) but they don't do it out of the kindness of their hearts or only because it's good for business, they do it pretty much because they HAVE TO due to the problematic nature of this product category. They spend virtually all their time on this forum fielding questions, hand holding, troubleshooting a myriad of common issues and stamping out product flaw brush fires that might affect future sales (hot pixels, focus problems, exposure problems, RFI, cracked GPS modules, power supply flaws, etc.) simply because these things just come with the territory when it comes to dash cams, even the better ones like SG. The fact that they have to engage in such fanatic 24/7, OCD product support is indicative of what I'm getting at here.
 
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I've skimmed through and haven't seen mention but have you checked the capacitors / supercaps in the camera itself? May be worth a look if not as possibly they're at the end of their lifespan.

Anything is possible but I doubt that the caps are the problem. Firstly, they look fine upon visual examination but more significantly, the problem I'm dealing with is a start-up issue. On shut down, the last file is always saved properly and there have been no issues with corrupted files. I believe a super-cap failure would more likely manifest on shut-down than start-up.
 
Possibly but the caps would always be charged at startup so potentially something going on at that point - I don't know if they're just flat out charged for say 30 seconds or whether there's something in the circuit which measures when they're ready?

The caps looked fine in the hardware I had issues with - not even any sign of a bulge but the hardware itself was rebooting randomly, hanging on boot or flat out refusing to power on yet sometimes it would work fine for hours on end.

I'd even sent it back to warranty it and they sent it back saying they couldn't see a fault - luckily they didn't charge return shipping.

I replaced the power supply caps in that instance with high temperature Panasonics and the difference was night and day and I was very happy to have recovered the box (a DVR).

Worth a thought anyway if all other avenues are exhausted and I hope you figure it out.
 
Possibly but the caps would always be charged at startup so potentially something going on at that point - I don't know if they're just flat out charged for say 30 seconds or whether there's something in the circuit which measures when they're ready?

The caps looked fine in the hardware I had issues with - not even any sign of a bulge but the hardware itself was rebooting randomly, hanging on boot or flat out refusing to power on yet sometimes it would work fine for hours on end.

I'd even sent it back to warranty it and they sent it back saying they couldn't see a fault - luckily they didn't charge return shipping.

I replaced the power supply caps in that instance with high temperature Panasonics and the difference was night and day and I was very happy to have recovered the box (a DVR).

Worth a thought anyway if all other avenues are exhausted and I hope you figure it out.

I appreciate what you are suggesting and as I said in my previous reply to you, "anything is possible", so perhaps you could be correct that the problem is the super-capacitors.

At this point however, I've been hassling with this problem since the last week or so of September, nearly four months now and have jumped through numerous hoops attempting to diagnose the issue. I am not inclined at this point to go out and spend money on new super-capacitors I may not need or waste even more time I don't have doing "experimental" repairs on an aging, unreliable dash camera with a (slight) left side focus problem.

In the meantime, I've tested the camera several times with the original Street Guardian power supply along with my usual dual USB 2.4 Amp cigar lighter adapter and have found no difference in the results. To make the issue more vexing, the camera has been performing flawlessly for the last several days even though we are back in the deep freeze. It will likely go down to around 0º Fahrenheit (-17.78°C) tonight and even colder in the next few days. At this point, I've concluded that my theory about cold temps affecting this problem was wrong.
 
I've been hassling with this problem since the last week or so of September, nearly four months now and have jumped through numerous hoops attempting to diagnose the issue. I am not inclined at this point to go out and spend money on new super-capacitors I may not need or waste even more time I don't have doing "experimental" repairs on an aging, unreliable dash camera with a (slight) left side focus problem.
I have been reading your thread with interest, not least because I have a V2 in my wife's car that I don't check as often as I feel I should.

I admire your persistence with attempting to diagnose the problem(s).
 
I have been reading your thread with interest, not least because I have a V2 in my wife's car that I don't check as often as I feel I should.

I admire your persistence with attempting to diagnose the problem(s).

Thanks. My patience is wearing rather thin at this point though. I don't like living with a camera where I have to check each time to confirm that it is actually recording at every start-up. Unfortunately, with the weather being so cold (and two major snow storms on the way) there is nothing much I can do about it at the moment. If we are fortunate enough to get a typical January Thaw at some point I'm going to see about replacing the SG9665GC with something more reliable. It's a question of getting 3M VHB tape to adhere to glass in sub-zero temperatures.

Yes, it would certainly be a good idea to check on your wife's V2. In fact, since we currently have at least one other person here on DCT reporting the same issue (Odd SG9665GC V2 startup behavior) it would be a good idea for anyone with a SG9665GC V2 to check their camera to confirm that it begins recording at start-up.
 
So, I left my house to make a quick trip into town shortly after posting the above reply to Tony and immediately discovered that my GC was acting up again after several trouble free days. This time, the camera booted up and began recording as normal but the screensaver never activated. It's set to turn off the screen after 15 seconds but it just stayed illuminated. As before, briefly unplugging the camera from the USB port on the power adapter and plugging it back in will get the camera back to functioning normally.

The similar but different symptoms here are starting to feel like a moving target. I can't see how a bad power supply could start the camera with full power and normal recording but not activating the screen saver. I don't quite see how bad super-caps could do that either. And we know it's not the USB cable or the memory card. I'm now leaning towards a failed (or failing) component on the PCB as I speculated earlier. Might be time to remove the question mark from the title of this thread.
 
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Yes, it would certainly be a good idea to check on your wife's V2.
I check it visually whenever I'm the passenger in her car, perhaps twice a month, but I rarely pull the card and check the recordings.
 
If we are fortunate enough to get a typical January Thaw at some point I'm going to see about replacing the SG9665GC with something more reliable. It's a question of getting 3M VHB tape to adhere to glass in sub-zero temperatures.
Do you have a spare reliable Mobius 1 you can mount onto the SG until warmer weather arrives? You could attach them together indoors and make use of the existing screen mount.
 
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Do you have a spare reliable Mobius 1 you can mount onto the SG until warmer weather arrives? You could attach them together indoors and make use of the existing screen mount.

Thanks for the suggestion. No doubt I will come up with a solution.
 
For the last week or so my SG9665GC has been working pretty well despite bitter cold, below zero temperatures. The other day it started up and ran just fine at 0º Fahrenheit (-17.777º Celcius), so the once again the issue doesn't seem to be temperature related.

Then today (about an hour ago actually) the problems I've been describing suddenly returned. It was 24º F and the camera booted up but froze with a persistant live video image on the screen. The white LED power light was on but not the record indicator or the MIC indicator. Of course, the camera was not recording but the live image continued to be displayed. Finally, I unplugged the camera and watched as the image on the screen slowly faded away leaving the white power LED on and that too eventually faded to black. I tried unplugging and re-plugging the camera from the power supply and initially I got the same results. Rebooting the camera a second time got it work normally again.

Occasionally, even when the camera is functioning well, when I shut the camera down after returning home it takes an unusually long time (maybe 8-10 seconds) for the power indicator and the REC indicator to extinguish after the camera appears to have turned off. I've gone to the effort to test the cam with different power supplies including the original Street Guardian one the camera came with but in the end the results are the same or similar even if the camera appears to work well for several days in a row.
 

It is. What's weird is that the symptoms keep changing slightly......and then it works fine for a while. The way the LEDs and screen faded out today seem like a possible failing power component on the pcb.
 
Electronics. :rolleyes: :mad:

First my friend had H.265 issues with his SJ8 action camera, now changed to H.264 it should be fixed, and sure he can also playback the files and import them into pinnacle studio, but the program lock up after chewing on the footage for a minute or so, but footage from his gopro is just fine.
I go to his place tomorrow to push some buttons, and take his cursed SJ8 camera with me home to give it a spin here, its not the editing software as it work fine with footage from any other camera, and it cant really be the memory card as the recordings are not corrupted in any way and can playback.
And most funny of all if he record a short clip with the SJ8 its fine to play and edit, but longer > 1 minute recordings will not work in the editing program for some reason.

I really don't know what i can try, but i will give it a go none the less.

But pinnacle lock up so hard on the SJ8 footage he can turn it off but he can not start it before the computer have been rebooted, that's strange too i think.
And his windows 10 don't say a peep about pinnacle apparently crashing / locking up, it just do so.
 
Electronics. :rolleyes: :mad:

First my friend had H.265 issues with his SJ8 action camera, now changed to H.264 it should be fixed, and sure he can also playback the files and import them into pinnacle studio, but the program lock up after chewing on the footage for a minute or so, but footage from his gopro is just fine.
I go to his place tomorrow to push some buttons, and take his cursed SJ8 camera with me home to give it a spin here, its not the editing software as it work fine with footage from any other camera, and it cant really be the memory card as the recordings are not corrupted in any way and can playback.
And most funny of all if he record a short clip with the SJ8 its fine to play and edit, but longer > 1 minute recordings will not work in the editing program for some reason.

I really don't know what i can try, but i will give it a go none the less.

But pinnacle lock up so hard on the SJ8 footage he can turn it off but he can not start it before the computer have been rebooted, that's strange too i think.
And his windows 10 don't say a peep about pinnacle apparently crashing / locking up, it just do so.

Yes, I've read your thread(s) about that. Sounds like there's something weird with the particular files from the SJ8.
 
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My friend are a problem magnet, or at least it feel that way to me cuz i am the one that have to untangle his mess again and again.
And while i do cherish a challenge now and then then some times i just have to give up, and that's when my friend break out the 12 gauge to end problems.

I really hate we have lost the picture of us blowing up a PC of his, it was one of those old cases where sides and top was in one piece, so the picture have that piece of metal spread out and angled so it looked like a bird a few feet or so over the explosion, looked do damn cool and a 1 in a million picture as it was before i started to use burst recordings.
 
So, four days of the camera functioning normally and then today suddenly I'm back to having start-up woes. Camera boots up but hangs with a live image on the screen that will not go away. No recording is happening. The white power LED is on but the REC indicator is off as is the MIC indicator. When I finally unplug the camera the image on the screen persists for maybe five seconds or so. During this time the MIC indicator suddenly illuminates and then the screen finally fades to black as the camera shuts off. Manually re-booting the camera gets it working.

This is becoming a huge PITA! Unfortunately, in the weather conditions we are currently experiencing I'm stuck with this situation. If it were a different time of year I'd take the damned Street Guardian GC out back and shoot it!
 
An interesting thing here is that the magenta tint and washed out image that appeared when I first reported this problem is no longer happening. The only change since then was the new USB cable that initially appeared to have fixed the whole problem. BTW, I've now tested the camera with three different power supplies and since the cam manifests the problems with all three I can eliminate that as a possible cause of the issue.
 
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