In article , Zentraleinheit
writes
open the tape door and sniff it, if you smell fish then it's the caps for
sure.

Put my nose right in the tape door - didn't smell anything.

I would suspect surface mount capacitors are leaking. They're spread all
over the circuit boards inside the camera

What would these capacitors have to do with the image that the camcorder is
picking up via its CCD?

And why would only "live" pictures be affected while everything else is
working OK?


There's 2 main parts of a camcorder - the CCD pickup (the cam) and the
tape deck (the corder). If one bit goes wrong, the other bit may
continue to work. THe capacitors are part of the electronics which makes
it work (or not).

I have an (even older) Canon E60 which went the same way. First the
camera section stopped working, but the tape deck would still play back
tapes OK. Then a few months later the tape part stopped working as well.

It will be cheaper to buy a new camera than to try and fix it.
--
Tim Mitchell