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My experience with the M240 - with some negative points


nik_nik9

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I just tried mine again but this time leaving 5 minutes to go to sleep rather than the 2½ I did last time. I now come up with a figure of 1.83 seconds from sleep LV off to shutter firing, with exposure in Classic Mode. I think the 2 minutes to sleep must be rather an approximate figure. Not perfect but I still don't think I will find it a big issue for my style of photography. Once we have spare batteries, we can always set the time to sleep to a larger figure.

 

Wilson

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Wilson, I'm trying to think of any variables other than SD cards. What card are you using, i.e. how fast?

 

I'm running the latest firmware. Consistently taking nearly 5 seconds to wake.

 

Stephen,

 

I am using a 45 MB/s 16GB San Disk Extreme Video card.

 

Wilson

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Stephen,

 

I am using a 45 MB/s 16GB San Disk Extreme Video card.

 

Wilson

 

I have a feeling we may have found our answer. I'm using Class 10 cards with a max. write speed of 10 MB/s. I don't have anything faster because these worked in the M9 and as the old saying goes, if it ain't broke...

 

Can you test a slower card and see what the wakeup time is?

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I don't have any San Disk 45 MB/s Extreme Video SD cards, but just for the sake of trying something I changed from the Transcend SDHC 16gig class 10 card to a Mustang 16GB Le Mans Class 10 card (I found in my wife's D-Lux 5) and my wake time improved from 5 sec to just over 2 seconds.

 

I have a feeling we are all going to be testing cards very soon. I know I will be buying some new ones.

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On a sidenote, I do not get the impression from the reports that there is a need to switch it off or put it to sleep during a shoot. Correct?

 

Leaving camera on but sleep off etc. results in battery drainage of 5% per hour from my experiment this morning.

 

If 'instant' access is a must and you don't use all the extra toys/buttons then I suppose you could just about manage a working day if you started with a full battery ......:rolleyes:

 

I think I'd rather wait half a second and have plenty of power in reserve.....

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I don't have any San Disk 45 MB/s Extreme Video SD cards, but just for the sake of trying something I changed from the Transcend SDHC 16gig class 10 card to a Mustang 16GB Le Mans Class 10 card (I found in my wife's D-Lux 5) and my wake time improved from 5 sec to just over 2 seconds.

 

I have a feeling we are all going to be testing cards very soon. I know I will be buying some new ones.

 

Someone mentioned before that the wake up time depends on number of pictures on the card. Can you guys look at the number of pictures you have on those cards and see if there is any correlation?

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Someone mentioned before that the wake up time depends on number of pictures on the card. Can you guys look at the number of pictures you have on those cards and see if there is any correlation?

 

My tests are being done with freshly formatted cards, but it is more than possible that a card with more images might result in a slower startup time.

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There should be no correlation between number of images and wake-up time.

 

Not necessarily. Depends on how the firmware is written to interrogate the card as to available space, write sectors, etc. (but this is not my area of expertise, I was a program manager not an engineer).

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It would make sense. When you are in advanced mode, you can hear the shutter open on power up/wake up. In classic mode you don't. I think however, it is only fractions of a second.

 

Wilson

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Not necessarily. Depends on how the firmware is written to interrogate the card as to available space, write sectors, etc.[....]

 

The card keeps track of number of images, the next available block, and so-forth. It is built into the computation section of the card itself.

 

It is a fascinating process, but probably not to enough people here to warrant explaining.

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But not all firmware is written the same Pico. I worked on one thermal camera project where the startup time was absolutely affected by the number of images stored on the card. The more images stored, the slower the startup time. Sales guys screamed until engineering made changes and improved the boot time.

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If I can get a matching button made for the zoom/EV button on the front, I will do so and bond this on to the existing button. I find the recessed button quite difficult to depress consistently with my non-bendy fingers.

 

Wilson

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It may be of course that after the card problems with the M9, Leica are being cautious in the M and going through some sort of data validation on startup to prevent data corruption problems. In that case, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the size of the card and the number of files on the card will have a bearing on the start-up times.

 

You could argue that the need for such validation is reduced if the card is the same one in there when the camera was last awake but cards do not have an infinite life - they wear out - and nothing is worse than to find your images corrupted. I'm afraid Leica are between a rock and a hard place and I don't expect the move to ever larger cards is making things easier.

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Leaving camera on but sleep off etc. results in battery drainage of 5% per hour from my experiment this morning.

 

If 'instant' access is a must and you don't use all the extra toys/buttons then I suppose you could just about manage a working day if you started with a full battery ......:rolleyes:

 

I think I'd rather wait half a second and have plenty of power in reserve.....

 

The old mobile phone/computer trick of keeping the screen brightness as low as possible and shortening the preview time during use will probably more than offset this potential power drain. I keep mine as low as possible, and preview as short as possible on the M9 & Monochrom. Just enough to see the histogram is ample for me. Battery life is then fine and I rarely need to use my spare batteries.

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