G3 occasionally not storing pictures, just black...

I had several occasions where my G3 didn't store any image, but something completely black. And yeah, I took the lenscover off....
I had this about 5 times on about 700 shots so far.
Has anyone else seen this?

The EXIF data looks fine, just reports aperture and speed as I would expect and which is consistent with the other pictures I took at the same time.

It is not like it is a severely underexposed picture. On the histogram I can see that there are only black pixels.

It once happened during shooting in stitch-assist mode where exposure etc. is fixed. One picture in the middle of the sequence is black.

Canon service basically says: this could be caused by a multitude of things so we don't know, and hey it's 'only' one in 100...

BartS said:

I had several occasions where my G3 didn't store any image, but
something completely black. And yeah, I took the lenscover off....
I had this about 5 times on about 700 shots so far.
Has anyone else seen this?
The EXIF data looks fine, just reports aperture and speed as I
would expect and which is consistent with the other pictures I took
at the same time.
It is not like it is a severely underexposed picture. On the
histogram I can see that there are only black pixels.
It once happened during shooting in stitch-assist mode where
exposure etc. is fixed. One picture in the middle of the sequence
is black.

Canon service basically says: this could be caused by a multitude
of things so we don't know, and hey it's 'only' one in 100...

Click to expand...

Yes Bart, I've a two shots in about 500 that turned out black on my G3. However I was in manual mode and was severely messing with the settings and attributed it to my lack of manual knowledge. I don't know if this also applies to you. Likely not.

Just another idea: Perhaps a bad compact flash card? Have you tried a different card?

Olga

OlgaJ said:

Just another idea: Perhaps a bad compact flash card? Have you tried
a different card?

Olga

Click to expand...

I'm using the Microdrive all the time. I never used the original 32Mb card, it's too small really.

But maybe it is unlikely that it has to do with the card: after all it doesn't seem like there is a problem with writing information, it's only the wrong information that is written...?

Bart

Stephen Houdek said:

BartS said:

I had several occasions where my G3 didn't store any image, but
something completely black. And yeah, I took the lenscover off....
I had this about 5 times on about 700 shots so far.
Has anyone else seen this?
The EXIF data looks fine, just reports aperture and speed as I
would expect and which is consistent with the other pictures I took
at the same time.
It is not like it is a severely underexposed picture. On the
histogram I can see that there are only black pixels.
It once happened during shooting in stitch-assist mode where
exposure etc. is fixed. One picture in the middle of the sequence
is black.

Canon service basically says: this could be caused by a multitude
of things so we don't know, and hey it's 'only' one in 100...

Click to expand...

Yes Bart, I've a two shots in about 500 that turned out black on my
G3. However I was in manual mode and was severely messing with the
settings and attributed it to my lack of manual knowledge. I don't
know if this also applies to you. Likely not.

Click to expand...

Fumbling up the settings could definitely apply to me ... ;-)

Someone else had the same problem and he thought it was because of accidentally changing settings during the taking of the picture.

But with me it has happened in the middle of a panorama stitch sequence (where exposure etc. are all fixed).

I said:

I had several occasions where my G3 didn't store any image, but
something completely black. And yeah, I took the lenscover off....

Click to expand...

Well, it happened again TWICE yesterday... Anyone know if this could be connected to the IBM microdrive??

Well, you may want to check out your microdrive on a computer with a good diagnostics program (Norton, Ontrack,etc) to see whats up. You might have a flaw in the directory structure on the drive, and Norton Utilities can do a deep surface scan to find bad sectors. And if you haven't done it recently, reformat it.

Of course, if you have a CF also you might see if you can recreate the problem; just let you camera fire in the interval mode for 100 rounds.

I kind of feel sorry for the Canon guy. I think we sometimes forget that these cameras are really computers; and with the amount of code sitting in them the failure modes and "bugs" are probably pretty hard to diagnose. (worse case scenerio: what if we find out that at the bottom of it all is a Microsoft product!!)

Perhaps one day they will put a "diagnostic bus" in the things like we have in cars, so you plug it in to your computer and it tells you what part of it is not feeling well today.

Hi BartS,

I think its likely you tried to shoot when the flash is still charging causing it to severly underexpose. Happened to my G3 and 420ex when the batteries were low.

Ben Lim said:

Hi BartS,
I think its likely you tried to shoot when the flash is still
charging causing it to severly underexpose. Happened to my G3 and
420ex when the batteries were low.

Click to expand...

Well, it's not like it's underexposed: I checked the histogram, and there's nothing there, all pixels are at the far left. And it also happens during non-flash pictures.

Pat L. said:

Well, you may want to check out your microdrive on a computer with
a good diagnostics program (Norton, Ontrack,etc) to see whats up.
You might have a flaw in the directory structure on the drive, and
Norton Utilities can do a deep surface scan to find bad sectors.
And if you haven't done it recently, reformat it.

Click to expand...

I did reformat, but running diags is a good idea. But I doubt if the drive is the problem. It seems like the card is storing everything OK (no error messages), it just get sent the wrong data...

Pat L. said:

Of course, if you have a CF also you might see if you can recreate
the problem; just let you camera fire in the interval mode for 100
rounds.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately I only have the original 32Mb card. And I usually shoot RAW of Large Superfine...

Pat L. said:

I kind of feel sorry for the Canon guy. I think we sometimes forget
that these cameras are really computers; and with the amount of
code sitting in them the failure modes and "bugs" are probably
pretty hard to diagnose. (worse case scenerio: what if we find out
that at the bottom of it all is a Microsoft product!!)

Click to expand...

I sort of agree with your comment about the Canon guy. I know how hard it is to diagnose intermittent failures. Like a car that always makes strange noises, except when it is looked at by the mechanic.

Pat L. said:

Perhaps one day they will put a "diagnostic bus" in the things like
we have in cars, so you plug it in to your computer and it tells
you what part of it is not feeling well today.

Click to expand...

That would be nice... Well, you never know what Canon is recording in the G3...