sd14 firmware 1.07 bugs?

[Ed_S]

Hello Guido,

Sorry to hear of your problems - a few thoughts,,

and exposure problem as well !
i was this weekend in Saarland (Germany) visiting family . The
weather was excellent and i started to shoot with sd14 + 18-200 os
and wirhout removing the lens after a while exposure went mad .
I set iso to 50 and 100 and i used autobracketing 0,3 ev . After some
good shots in 'normal' and easy lghtconditions i saw on he lcd that a
lot were overexposed .
let me explain that :
1° the green corner problem is never cleared out : in my opnion it
has to do with a hardware problem and sigma tries to solve it in SPP

Forgive my being slow on the uptake - I've heard the green corners mostly associated with the DP1. Is this somewhat rare with SDs or have I been napping as usual?

2° until now i have no tecnical problems with camera and lenses but
the camera system is outdated .

Are these the "general complaints" about the bare bones design philosophy or some specific problems you've identified?

3° i bought the sigma ef 530 super flash specially to use wireless
flash with the sd14, as it is shown on the sigma website and flash
manual : IS NOT WORKING !

Sorry - no experience with that myself

4° now exposure is going mad .

What kind of exposure problems? Honestly curious.

what's next ?
i am very unhappy
guido

Best,
--
Ed_S
http://www.pbase.com/ecsquires

 

[vespachi]

Guido,

This sounds very familiar to what I had in the summer of 2007 in Spain after 2 weeks. I tried to reinstall the firmware and the camera even got worse.

I wasn't using auto bracketing but changing the EV & lenses quite often in a day.

Sigma replaced the camera but I'm a little more scared after that in changing EV constantly. In my case it had nothing to do with 1.07 ( i think it was on 1.02)

and exposure problem as well !
i was this weekend in Saarland (Germany) visiting family . The
weather was excellent and i started to shoot with sd14 + 18-200 os
and wirhout removing the lens after a while exposure went mad .
I set iso to 50 and 100 and i used autobracketing 0,3 ev . After some
good shots in 'normal' and easy lghtconditions i saw on he lcd that a
lot were overexposed .
let me explain that :
1° the green corner problem is never cleared out : in my opnion it
has to do with a hardware problem and sigma tries to solve it in SPP
2° until now i have no tecnical problems with camera and lenses but
the camera system is outdated .
3° i bought the sigma ef 530 super flash specially to use wireless
flash with the sd14, as it is shown on the sigma website and flash
manual : IS NOT WORKING !
4° now exposure is going mad .
what's next ?
i am very unhappy
guido

 

[Sigmaficent]

thanks sigmaficent
i expect the birth of our first grandchild in the coming days . I
bought the flash for this event . i can not send the camera to sigma
as it is my only camera .
I realy do like the foveon 'look' . I already made great A2 photo's .
I am retired now and the camera is not earning money for me so i hate
to buy an other camera system but when the troubles do not stop i wil
have a look at the new sony + zeiss glass (i will visit the photokina
)
kindly,
guido

Hi Guido - congratulations on the forthcoming event - I am sure all the family will be overjoyed.

In the interim perhaps you may wish to try a camera reset from the menu - which has given me some respite in the past even if only for a short time until the SD14 starts doing silly things again - it may though be enough to capture those all important first shots of your grandchild.

If successful I look forward to seeing them.

Regards

Hugh
--
http://www.pbase.com/hught

 

[Neil Legg]

Camera locking up. Strange image files. I am having exactly the same problems since installing firmware 1.07.

I have contacted Sigma UK and they are looking into the problem as they have already been made aware of it.

I would have to be honest and say that so far I have been disappointed with my sigma. Every image appears to be very green. SPP is so slow its tedious. My 18-50 EX macro appears soft at anything in the wide end, even tho Sigma checked it and have said its within tollerances. I have had some decent images to be fair but I cant say its been many. I use a Nikon D80 at work and if I had the opportunity I would probably jump ship! Thats a shame because I love the feel of the camera, its quiet shutter and layout. The 70-200 EX I also have, is a lovely lens.

Can anyone tell me what I can do to improve things?

 

[Sigmaficent]

Camera locking up. Strange image files. I am having exactly the same
problems since installing firmware 1.07.

I have contacted Sigma UK and they are looking into the problem as
they have already been made aware of it.

I would have to be honest and say that so far I have been
disappointed with my sigma. Every image appears to be very green. SPP
is so slow its tedious. My 18-50 EX macro appears soft at anything in
the wide end, even tho Sigma checked it and have said its within
tollerances. I have had some decent images to be fair but I cant say
its been many. I use a Nikon D80 at work and if I had the opportunity
I would probably jump ship! Thats a shame because I love the feel of
the camera, its quiet shutter and layout. The 70-200 EX I also have,
is a lovely lens.

Can anyone tell me what I can do to improve things?

Hi Neil - I am not sure I can help with the majority of these issues but I have noticed from my own analysis that colours are more 'correct' if the SD14 exposure is set to +0.3 EV.

Might be worth trying in the interim and it would be a useful comparison if you were getting similar results to what I have.

--
http://www.pbase.com/hught

 

[Guido FORRIER]

hello Eds ,

the green corners are also a sd14 problem . mostly with wide angle lens as is the case with 17-20 mm of my 17-70mm sigma . i already mentioned it in the past (see also the reply's from lightripper ) . that is why i have predicted the green corners with the dp1 before it came on the market ( in a reply on this forum). There are still examples of green corners on the dp1 website !
see:
http://www.sigma-DP1.com/sample-photo/img/SigmaDP1-015
as far as i know it must be hardware problem + solved in the latest SPP .

the software i like , raw developer , can not deal with this greencorners . That can be also the reason (?) there is no other software for de dp1 than SPP.

Wait and see : are the green corners still there in de DP2,DP3 with less wide lenses ?
"The camera is outdated " = general complaint

Most of the inovations in other camera's are not special anymore and even pro photographers accept that life view , life histogram , antishake are very usable . See the specifications of the upcoming SONY A900 .
I do not understand the lack of life histogram in the dp1 .

The exposure problems : with 50/100 iso in bright daylight and easy lightconditions suddenly the camera overexposes more than 1 ev and the image is completely washed out .
greetings,
guido

 

[Guido FORRIER]

thank you, Hugh!
if succesful (why not ?) i will show some pictures
guido

 

[Topi]

The exposure problems : with 50/100 iso in bright daylight and easy
lightconditions suddenly the camera overexposes more than 1 ev and
the image is completely washed out .

Guido,

That sounds pretty much like my camera...

Cheers,

-Topi Kuusinen, Finland

 

[Neil Legg]

Thanks for that. If I can stop it locking up and producing dodgy files then I will give it a go! Hopefully Sigma will release firmware 1.08 asap!! Oh for enough cash to buy a Nikon D3!!!! ))

 

[vespachi]

Neil Legg wrote:
. Every image appears to be very green. SPP

is so slow its tedious.
Can anyone tell me what I can do to improve things?

Since you use a sd14
Use Adobe Lightroom and forget about SPP.

Make sure you render all 1:1 previews first and then when finished use the program.

 

[Neil Legg]

Thanks for that. Will give it a go.

 

[Ed_S]

Guido,

Thanks - green corners were news to me as far as personal experience but I appreciate the update. I'll give some older shots a glance but don't recall seeing it myself.

Kind regards,
--
Ed_S
http://www.pbase.com/ecsquires

 

[Guido FORRIER]

Ed ,
look here : my photo



and : dp1 sigma website :



greetings,
guido

 

[FelixW]

--
http://www.felixwesch.de

 

[SandyF]

that's not a super-size file, that's a mega-file... !

Did you see my post about relative sizes? I found the JPEG also increased in size, as well as RAW data part, but not in exact % proportions in the 3 files I looked at. Detail is fine, not 'corrupted' or damaged files thus far for me. It's weird.

So you think your SD14's 'color' changed with the firmware 1.07 update? I've been mulling over what f 1.07 did.. see my experiments today http://www.pbase.com/sandyfleischman/dp1_experiments&page=2
Best regards, Sandy
[email protected]
http://www.pbase.com/sandyfleischman (recent photos)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandyfleischmann

 

[ToasterFlyer]

My biggest file size so far has been 37.5mb..

Rich
ny

 

[Ed_S]

I was out at the Indy speedway yesterday for one installment of my annual pilgrimage. I was primarily shooting my SD 14 interchanging the 50mm f2.8, 28-300 f3.5, and a 500mm mirror lens T Mount with a Pentax type adapter. Clear skies, bright sun, lots of concrete.

I started getting random overexposures with the 28-300mm lens. On one occasion the camera didn't recognize the lens entirely (that's happened once before) after switching from the mirror lens (no electronics connections). The exifs indicated a "0" mm setting although the lens itself shows up. Blown out exposures at least a couple of stops too bright. This happened at least a couple of other times although not always switching from the mirror lens. In some cases the images could be pulled back - others not. This only seems to happen in certain circumstances with the 28-300 lens which also seemed not to focus in the first instance only. The EXIF suggests about a 2 stop overexposure by the way.

As soon as I can escape the paying job for a little while, I plan to see if I can reproduce the situation. In the first instance, removing the lens and replacing it seemed to restore normal operation - perhaps the camera/firmware was confused by the temporary presence of the manual lens??? Later I switched batteries and thought that low current might have been the culprit - but alas some of the gremlins occurred with a fully charged battery. Interestingly, although the histograms on a couple of test shots of the concrete pavement appeared pegged to the right and the in-camera was essentially a blank, white screen, spp 2.5 pulled the details out 90% or better in AUTO mode. Curiouser and curiouser.

Oh and by the way - I realize a first inclination would be the 28-300 as culprit, but this only started with 1.07. Hmmmm?

Comments welcome.
--
Ed_S
http://www.pbase.com/ecsquires

 

[dr.noise]

I never payed attention to file sizes. Now I see that they are becoming bigger indeed. The biggest file shot in April is 28 Mb, and 21 Mb in May. In January the maximum was 17 Mb.

I could not say that there is too much details, there could be, but they are rather blurry. The 21 Mb shot mainly consists of well-blurred background.
The preview is OK and the camera did not lock up or behave strangely.
Now I'm wondering, is 28 Mb normal?

 

[DonalDuc]

I didn't update from 1.06 to 1.07 and my files are 10/11/12 mb, few are 13 mb.

 

[SandyF]

I never payed attention to file sizes. Now I see that they are
becoming bigger indeed. The biggest file shot in April is 28 Mb, and
21 Mb in May. In January the maximum was 17 Mb.
I could not say that there is too much details, there could be, but
they are rather blurry. The 21 Mb shot mainly consists of
well-blurred background.
The preview is OK and the camera did not lock up or behave strangely.
Now I'm wondering, is 28 Mb normal?

I don't think it's normal to be regularly going over 20MB.
In about 8000+ SD14 photos I only had maybe 3-5 previously over 20MB

Related thread, http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=27819335

gives my experience now with the super-size files.... also no errors or lock-ups, just unusually large files at a fairly high % of my SD14 photos.
Best regards, Sandy
[email protected]
http://www.pbase.com/sandyfleischman
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandyfleischmann