Strange or coincidental that 2 of you have reported the issue on the same day...
I can see why you might think this but I've been lurking on the forum for weeks trying to solve my issue, when I saw Dossan's post (whose problem exactly replicated mine) I joined the forum and posted......surely this is one of the points of a forum??!!
Anyway, thanks for your suggestions. I will continue trying to resolve this issue with my HDR-1100S which, besides this problem, is a nice piece of kit - hopefully I won't have to go through the rigmarole of having to return it: fortunately I bought it from John Lewis and it came with a 2 year guarantee (thanks for the warning that Humax only replace with a recon unit).