400D broken any ideas? A photos many many stops under exposed.

BillyBag2 wrote:

I have a 400D. The light meter appears to be broken. The settings are fixed and are not effected by light. Eg lens cap on compared to pointing and a light. The camera thinks it is bright as all the photos are many many stops under exposed. (solid black). Works OK in manual mode. I.E. sensor is OK.

It was working. I upgrade the FW to 1.1.1 and also added 400Plus. These appear to work fine but I now have this fault.

How does metering work? Is it through the sensor that takes the photo or a separate device? Is this likely to be a SW issue to do with the upgrade or a coinsidental HW fault such as a cabling issue?

Anyone ever see or heard of a fault like this? Was there a fix?

The camera was working fine until you installed the hack software 400Plus!

Um, perhaps therein lies the 'problem'? And answer!

The first, and easiest, test would be to stop using 400plus and see if the problem is corrected.  If it is, then you should probably look at how to configure or setup 400plus to meet your needs.  Perhaps there are some default values or perhaps you inadvertently set the camera to a set of parameters that would result in underexposed images.

However, I would expect there to be some reports from others that they also hit this issue. I cannot find this.

I've not been able to find others who have had this issue. Therefore I cannot rule out coincidence.

I've not been able to fully undo the hack. I can start without the SW part on the CF. The camera still does not work. (even if I leave it without a battery for a while.) However I know the firmware hack part is still inplace as the blue light flashes. I do not get the extra memus. This happens even if I reflash with the latest production FW. (It states on the 400Plus site that the first part cannot be undone)

These seams even more strainge as I think the first part of the hack is quite simple, just makes the camera boot?/load? from CF. It does not fiddle with camera operation at all.  Its only the SW on the CF that starts to fidle with things.

The problem still happens with the 400Plus SW removed. The part that enables the use of the SW on the CF cannot be undone. However this FW part should be simple and does not change how the camera itself works. Cannot undo the firat part, even by flashing the original Canon FW to the camera.

This is interesting. The camera has a rattle from the area of the popup flash. I don't think exposure is not the same as when flash is used. Flash normally cause a speed of somthing like 1/200 I think. I'm getting much faster than that 1/400 or more, depending on the settings. So its not as simple as it thinking it is using a flash.

I will check this out.

In your case did the camera just think it was using a flash or was it more confused than that?

I did try the three different exposure styles. The settings changed a little between them but all very very under exposed and not effected by light into the camera.

Thanks, I have a 400D I have not yet broken and it rattles too. Not a loose cable