I had an intermittent distortion problem with my pioneer camera. It turned out to be a loose connector connection at the Z1 unit. When I was checking the connections, I heard a click sound around the connection which meant that it was not secured. Now the image is perfect all the time. You can do some troubleshooting by hooking up a camcorder to the video input to the Z1 and see if the image is distorted. If it is distorted, then the Z1 has a problem. You can test the camera by hooking it up to the AUX input of the Z1 and see if it is distorted.