Weird thing with a HS-10

[ScorpiusOB1]

Yesterday I was taking shots with the HS10, and -having the Sun close enough to have lens flare probably helped- it stopped focusing at all distances and even in manual. After some tests with no success, turning off and on the camera worked.

I know it could be just an occasional glitch but it's the first time I experiment that on ten years using superzoom cameras. Has someone experimented that?.

 

[Dr JLW]

I still use my HS-10 but only in doors so all I can do is guess.

I suspect that your exposure to sunlight saturated the sensor enough to lock it up. Lacking input the camera computer froze.

Shutting it down powered down the sensor and let the sun charge bleed off the sensor. On power up the computer reset and saw the sensor.

I do see occasional "glicthes" in my HS-30. The camera sometimes becomes unresponsive and I recycle the power and it recovers.

I suspect this issue is common with all "Firmware" cameras. I worked with digital designers and their view was the firmware devices can get "Squishy" that stored progerams can occasionally fail to load accurately.

 

[ScorpiusOB1]

Thanks. After resetting it as you mention (odd that not even the manual focus worked), things were again as they shoud have been.

It was quite odd, since I like to capture sunsets and I often toy with the Sun's position to have flare, or better said the ghost image caused by the Sun's internal reflection on the lenses, and never had that issue either with the HS10 or any other camera.

 

[Dr JLW]

Manual focus is not what it had been. Now manual focus is way of "Advising" teh ficus processor on teh lens. For example if you try to sky photography by maunally setting it to infinity it wills till wander.

Manual focus operates only when the rest of the autofocus system works and is not a bypass. You can see this in the focus graphic which shows a yellow line where its algorithm has determined the focus to be.

 

[ScorpiusOB1]

I'm beginning to miss then those times when manual focus was really manual focus, at least with those fully manual film SLRs.

 

[Dr JLW]

I sometimes feel that way but when I used those old SLR's and rangefinder cameras I had no idea a camera could be as capable as the HS-10.

I don't use it often, but its ability to frame at 960 frames per second can be useful ad fun and is not widely available today.