Ouch. Just...ouch! It's been a long time since I've had a digital camera body fail. Maybe all the way back to my Nikon D2x days. It's never a comfortable thing and the resolution; even when the company that makes the product steps up, is time consuming, frustrating and ultimately erodes the idea of the camera's reliability. Dead cameras suck.
The camera in question is a Panasonic Lumix S1R. I bought it on November 28, 2019 and I've used it sparingly. I bought it as a back-up body for another S1R that I purchased about a month earlier. The camera has never been used in the rain, travels in a Think Tank backpack, has never been on a plane, or even a badly sprung pick-up truck. Of all my Panasonic cameras it's the one with the least mileage on it and since the advertising for the camera touts its robustness and impeccable build quality its untimely surrender of usability just galls me.
So, what happened? I'd set up a portrait session here in my studio with a good friend and had the camera set for a revisitation of my older style of portraiture. I was using it in the 1:1 crop mode and shooting raw files to a tested and almost new CFexpress card. The camera had a fresh battery in it and gave no hints of its impending demise. I was working with the camera on a tripod and lighting the session with LED lights. Room temperature around 68 degrees (f) and just enough humidity in the room to extinguish any static electricity.
I'd shot about 225 frames, reviewed some of them normally, and then stepped away from the camera for a few minutes to adjust lights and chat with my friend. The camera went into sleep mode and when I pushed the shutter button to wake it back up again it stayed dormant. I turned the camera off and turned it back on again. I got the following message: "turn camera off and turn back on again." We tried that a number of times but it was a loop that brought me back to the same message over and over again.
I didn't want to waste my friend's time or truncate the session so I reached into the equipment toolkit and pulled an identical body out of the drawer, put the 85mm lens on that camera and proceeded to finish the shoot (because that's exactly what professionals are supposed to do...).
After the session was over and my friend was off to some other engagement I went through the standard trouble-shooting protocol: I changed batteries. I tried different lenses. I swapped out memory cards. I turned the camera on while holding down various buttons. Nothing would allow me to leave the cycle of: turn on, get message, turn off.
My favorite camera store doesn't close until 7pm on weekdays so I called my trusty sales person and explained the problem. He took down the details and sent a message to the Panasonic technical representative. I'm now waiting for a call back from someone to find out what we do next. My optimistic side wants the resolution to happen like this: I get a secret formula of button presses and reset options from the tech support people. Once we bring the camera back to life we reload the firmware and everything turns out to be just right.
My second choice is that the store, the rep and the company decide to immediately make everything right by shipping me a new camera body overnight while the local store accepts the old one and takes responsibility for getting it back to Panasonic in trade for my new one.
My pessimistic self tells me an uncomfortable saga wherein fingers are pointed everywhere, the camera is sent in for warranty repair but it takes months to come back and then, two weeks later, the same problem resurfaces. I hope I'm absolutely wrong about this imagined option.
In one regard I've been proven correct about the need for professionals to have back-ups for their important gear. Lots of back-ups. That I was able to reach into a nearby drawer and pull out an identical camera model and finish the shoot the way I intended was a good thing and made me feel like a competent business person. I would never really tolerate having to tell a good client that I couldn't continue the job at hand because my "only" camera failed.
But this does break the feeling of trust in the equipment that I've been enjoying. Now I'll be on guard and nervous every time I take one of the S1R cameras out of my camera bag and start to use it. And that's a sad thing because it diminishes the joy of using gear you thought you could rely upon to work, as long as you kept it fed with batteries and safe from abuse.
I'm waiting (im)patiently for a response from someone today. There's still the second S1R and two S1s here in the office. I am not without workable tools. I'm just frustrated and a bit pissed off.
In other notes: We actually got a dusting of snow last night here in Austin. There was snow on the roof of the house and even across the windshield of my car. Studio Dog was delighted because she seems to love the cold (but I made her wear her sweater for her walk just so I'd be warm....) and now she's delighted because the sun is out and there are still spots of snow in the backyard that she can romp through and then track melted snow through the house.
It was 30 degrees (f) when I got to the swimming pool this morning. The air was cold, the water was warm and the sun was brilliant. The sky was clean with those nicely saturated blue hues I always like in photographs.
We did a good, long set and I worked on my freestyle technique with an extra dollop of diligence. I didn't think of my broken camera even once during the workout. I saved that nagging tug of concern for the drive back home.
Camera Death. So sad. I'll let you guys know how it all turns out. This is Panasonic's opportunity to show off their customer service and make a blogger who just celebrated his 26,000,000th page view this week happy....
Panasonic without question makes the most feature rich cameras for video pros, hands down. About a year ago, I was contemplating buying two GH5's for video work, with other cameras like the Sony A7III and Canon EOS R under consideration as well. I had owned a few models from each manufacturer, and all of them worked flawlessly except a few of the Panasonics. One was a GH4 that had a noise problem straight out of the box, another was a FZ2500 that had its time-lapse feature stop working completely. Those two instances weighed heavily on my decision to ultimately buy the A7III.
ReplyDeleteA year later, the Sony has delivered, for the most part, aside from it overheating on a few occasions when I didn't use it with the battery grip, which makes it more cumbersome than I like. However, it turns on and works every single time, just like every Sony camera I've ever owned. 'm contemplating getting into more serious video work - docs mainly. - and have been looking at the Panasonic S1H while the world waits for the mythical Sony A7SIII/IV to finally descend the heavens. The features are mind-blowing and while $4,000 is nothing to sneeze at, it's peanuts compared to similarly specced cinema cameras. However, I'm still spooked by my previous experience and I say all that to say, this didn't help sway me to bite the bullet and put a new S1H on my credit card.
It’s not dead. it’s resting.
ReplyDeletefollowing Michael...
ReplyDeleteI hope it's not a late camera.
LA-LA-LA - My fingers are in my ears - LA-LA-LA
ReplyDeleteThe very reason I own a P/L G9 is that my Sony cameras wanted me to turn them off and back on again. Except they never really came back on. The detailed story is long, involved, and not very interesting, but I seriously don't want to hear about Panasonic camera failures.
Ray, I shot tens of thousands of photos with a pair of G9s and never, ever had a second of mis-function. This is just one of those odd anomalies. We'll get it back on track.
ReplyDeleteNot good to hear. Even though my job this afternoon is only a few blocks from home and nothing urgent this convinced me to carry a second body.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, my one experience with Panasonic service in McAllen was not bad. Repair was reasonably prompt, even though parts had to come from Japan. Communication was only so-so and I had to initiate all of it. But overall a much better experience than some I've had with the big two.
Update: So, I bought two cameras from two different stores. One from Precision Camera here in Austin, Texas. The other from B&H in NYC. When I contacted Precision they assumed it was the camera I bought from them and immediately offered to replace the camera today. A clean, camera for camera swap. When I realized the serial number was from the B&H supplied camera it got more complicated.
ReplyDeleteI need to contact B&H or send the camera in to Panasonic for warranty repair. We'll see how the saga progresses.
I'll update here as I find out more....
A great vindication for all those years of owning and lugging around backups and per your last comment a great vote in favour of buying locally.
ReplyDeleteIt was the backup camera body that failed? Wouldn't that argue against having a backup? If you hadn't bought it you wouldn't have had a failure!
ReplyDeleteBut Terry....what if had happened the other way around? And really, since I was using this particular camera doesn't its twin automatically become the back up camera? It's all automated you know....
ReplyDeleteArg. I always used to skip bodies for my cameras opting to have an older model and a newer model. Your persistent writing about having 2 bodies meant for the first time I carry the same two bodies with the same batteries for all shoots.
ReplyDeleteI am sure this is just a glitch, after all not every body will come out perfect.
Looking forward to seeing some of these 1:1 portraits that inspired your gear choices recently.
Too bad about that camera. Hopefully Panasonic does well by you and your dealer. Reading your blog regularly, I decided that I definitely needed a backup camera for taking pics of my newborn kid. It's been a year, a camera has bit it from user error (grownup, backpack, water bottle), and that lesson has been worth all the money I spent implementing it. So, thanks.
ReplyDeleteI hope you have better luck than I did with Panasonic Australia. A faulty tripod mount on my G9 resulted in random power issues, the camera was unresponsive and powered off, it took them weeks to diagnose the issue. They only realised what the issue was after I did some googling and suggested to them that perhaps it could be the tripod mounting point after seeing others report the same problem. They did offer me a deal on any lens I wanted but I declined as I was completely fed up by that stage.
ReplyDeleteThe 1 mth old supplied battery indicated 1% level in camera even though battery charger showed its fully charged. Like driving a car with broken gas meter level. No idea how much juice is available.
ReplyDeleteCamera OK so far. Bought mine refurbished frm BH.
Maybe the backup should be a different make of camera, in case it’s a design fault in that model.
ReplyDeleteSame reason you never buy two identical hard disks for backup, always two different.
Time to look at boring, reliable old Canon ;)
Hugh, I would find it exceedingly difficult to put Panasonic L mount lenses on a "back-up" Canon 5Dm4. And I'm certainly not going to invest in a second line of lenses, just in case. Nope, if there's an endemic issue we'll move to a different body in the same system. But I think this is a one off glitch.
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, it makes you wonder if this was why it was returned to B&H originally.
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