Oops, my M8 froze.

[hammam]

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After Bob's recent post on manual WB, I wanted to try the soft release again on my M8, and I was doing some test shots, nothing spectacular, just from my balcony. I proceeded to change the WB, using K temperature, and when I hit the shutter release to confirm the WB, nothing happened. My M8 froze. I shut it off. Nothing. The top LCD remained on, and no button functioned. Then, I removed the battery, put it back, and it returned to normal. Good. But could this be a symptom of something worse lurking somewhere? Anybody experienced the same thing? BTW, I sometimes have the rapid scrolling symptom when using the wheel during «Set». M8 delivered in February, S/N 3105261, firm. 1.102. Thanks.

 

A bit scared.

[barjohn]

I have had one lock up but I can't remember now what it was from. I posted it earlier so it can be found. Scared me too. There are still many bugs in the software. I am surprised that the beta testers did not discover some of the bugs that have been posted in the thread on 1.102 firmware bugs. God beta testing should have revealed them and gotten them resolved before it was released. I will volunteer my services to test in the future if they are interested. I do bug testing as part of my management job managing a team of software developers. It is amazing how many bugs I find that our QA team misses.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

This bug has been reported since firmware 1.06 as all bugs have been reported before you guys even see them. Some just can't be fixed in time to release other parts of firmware that maybe more important. Also speaking for the rest of the beta testers i think your comment is out of line. How do you know what is reported or not, your assuming we don't know what we are doing. i think that is a bit unfair given the beta testers reputations and experience in the field of photography.

 

Remember it is our job to test and report and leica's job to release the firmware.

[DaveEP]

God beta testing should have revealed them and gotten them resolved before it was released. I will volunteer my services to test in the future if they are interested. I do bug testing as part of my management job managing a team of software developers. It is amazing how many bugs I find that our QA team misses.

 

I write software day in day out, and beta testers find things that I don't find, and visa versa. Then there are things that we 'all' miss and it's one of those 'duh!' moments when we all realise we missed it.

 

However, I can also say that there are things that the Beta testers find that I choose 'not' to fix in the next release, either for 'time' reasons, or simply because the root cause has not yet been discovered. When the root cause is found, it is fixed for sure. I found one only a couple of hours ago that was not really a bug, but a compiler optimization problem. What I wrote was correct, what the compiler produced was not. These are some of the hardest!

 

Sometimes you get 'lucky' and find a bug no one else has found, but often the same bug is found over and over again. However, until the software guys can reproduce it in the lab, they can't fix it! It takes repeatability to fix this stuff. It's far easier to find a bug and criticise than it is to repeat it, quantify it and fix it.

[barjohn]

Guy, I appologize if my post offended you. I reached what was perhaps an erroneoud conclusion based on the fact that I never saw a post from any tester saying the bugs you guys are reporting we already reported to Leica and for whatever reason they were unable to fix prior to this release. lacking such a statement I could only conclude you all missed them. While it is true that you and many of the testers have far more photography experience than do I, I doubt if many of you have anywhere close to my software experience (since 1963) and here we are talking about software issues. If I had the source code or the time to diss-assemble the code, I could probably find and fix the bugs if they are software and not hardware bugs.

 

Just a suggestion, if you and the other testers have already reported the bugs being reported in the thread and that you know that they have not been fixed you might just publish a list of the known but unresolved bugs and save us the time and headache of finding them on our own when we least expect it. The only one I was aware of was the green stripe at high ISO with the light at the edge of the frame.

[barjohn]

Dave,

 

I can't say that I disagree with anything you are saying. I too find many bugs my programmers miss and even our QA folks miss. Being able to reproduce the big is a very important element but there are times you have to find a fix with an intermitent and that is the real challenge and test of enginuity (spelling is probably wrong).

[charlesphoto99]

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I've now had two lock ups, both resolved by quickly removing and re-inserting the (same) battery. One happened with 1.092 and the other with 1.10 so I doubt it's anything that beta testers could catch, if it's even a firmware problem at all. I think the camera is fundamentally flawed, but so are many things in life. I think/hope eventually Leica will work it out.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Well a lot of it is reported but we are also under NDA also so if there is a bug we are really not supposed to say so in public either until the firmware is released and all we can say than is we did report it. It's a fine balance you have to understand. What I do is report any bug i see in beta and after a firmware release comes out I reported again but the public knows about it also. I know there are 4 public bugs there working on right now and also SDS and as David said pretty well it is easy sometimes to miss them but also almost impossible to repeat them in the lab so they can fix them and reason some of these bugs go through several cycles of firmware until they can pick it off . That is the biggest problem in the lab is finding the bugs we see on a constanty basis so it can be traced. The SDS alone there are several camera's immeaditely hit the bench after failure one being mine.

 

Also did not mean to jump on you but folks always want to blame someone and the poor beta tester all he can do is report what they see and that is about it, of course we make suggestions and such but ultimately leica has to find it in the lab to fix it. I have reported the above bug since November as well as others. One other thing of note is leica does give me a lot of leeway in our discussions here and has never said for me to not say something. They are very open on alot of this stuff. We would never have these discussions if it was Canon or Nikon.

[jonoslack]

 

Just a suggestion, if you and the other testers have already reported the bugs being reported in the thread and that you know that they have not been fixed you might just publish a list of the known but unresolved bugs and save us the time and headache of finding them on our own when we least expect it. The only one I was aware of was the green stripe at high ISO with the light at the edge of the frame.

 

C'mon John. If the bugs were repeatable enough to be able to put them in a bug list, then they should be sorting them out.

The problem with the issues that are left is that they are unpredictable, and depend on hardware AND subject as well as software.

It's really easy to make grand statements about beta testing - I've only been doing it since 1987, so I'm way behind you, but I can see that this is rather different from most software in that the obvious variance of both the hardware, and the subject makes prediction difficult, and reporting which is precise enough to be useful to an end user pretty useless.

 

As far as the Original Poster is concerned, I've had my first body freeze up like this 4 or 5 times - it's always been cured straight away by removing the battery - just like it was with my Olympus E1 and Nikon D200 before. Cameras are computers, and sometimes it just happens. I dont' think you should assume that it's a precursor to SDS (although, of course, it may be)

[rwfreund]

Now, if there were some sort of persistent storage of the last processor instruction executed, or even better, a call stack trace, that was saved away at each re-boot, then there might be some better info to give the Leica engineers other than "my camera froze up"

Engineers always want more data. I know about those type being one myself.

-bob

 

the problem with last instruction is that it all too ofter points to the idle loop or wait state location.

[PhilFarber]

I remember when I was testing early Kodak DSLR's (thru to the end) that they had a sequence of buttons to push that wrote a file to the card that allowed them to get an idea of what was causing either a crash or corrupt files. They actually were able to trace it one time to which exact wire was loose on my circut board. It was a great diagnostic tool. Maybe Solms has this and we don't know.

[jonoslack]

I remember when I was testing early Kodak DSLR's (thru to the end) that they had a sequence of buttons to push that wrote a file to the card that allowed them to get an idea of what was causing either a crash or corrupt files. They actually were able to trace it one time to which exact wire was loose on my circut board. It was a great diagnostic tool. Maybe Solms has this and we don't know.

Hi Phil

I was on the testing for the 14n and SLRn - I didn't know about this though. It was a good experience, and, in the end, it was a good camera too - pity they stopped.

[wilfredo]

I haven't had any lock-ups but I had a scare last week which was due to a dead battery. I'm taking a trip next month to Israel, and will take my Canon 5D with me, as a back-up. I would rather not carry the extra weight but I wish I could feel more confident about the M8. Too many people have had M8 problems on this forum to trust it as a sole camera. It looks like the Leica reputation for reliability is getting soft. In Israel I will be meeting with people on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides who are working for peace, so I'll take my 5D back-up. I could shoot film as a back-up, but really prefer not to.

 

Wilfredo

Benitez-Rivera Photography

[ho_co]

Wilfredo--

Sounds like a worthwhile and important trip. I hope it's a good one.

 

--HC

[barjohn]

What we do in our software is write a log file. All of the processing for every event whether human generated or machine generated must pass through our messaging system that writes a log file that captures everykeystroke or mouse action the user does and every low level instruction sent between modules. This allows us to reconstruct any failed event and see what the user was doing and what the computer was doing. By compressing these files we are able to capture from start to finish a complete sequence of events (sort of analogous to from power on to power off of a shoot session). Then if a failure occurs we are not dependent on the human's faulty memory of the sequence of events that led up to the failure. This is not hard to do in software and well worth the effort when you are working with object oriented systems that are event driven and you can not predict what the next event will be (much easier back in the old days of linear code with subroutines).

 

Guy, i apprecieate that if you are operating under an NDA that precludes your revelaing any bug information you can't. You might try to persuade Leica to allow it to prevent the appearance that the users are finding bugs you missed when for what ever reasons, legitimate or not, Leica has decided not to address those specific bugs in a particular release. I can fully understand why they might do that and really don't take issue with getting some fixes out now and other later. In fact I prefer that strategy.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

John to be honest no one is supposed to even know i am a beta tester , this was my decision to allow it be public with leica's okay. There are 6 others here that no one knows that is a beta tester .

 

Like I said earlier these bugs get fixed when they find them. If people feel i missed something than there is nothing I can do and that is just part of being public about it. That just comes with the territory and if people want to blame one person than really there just being stupid.

[okram]

Therefore:

Is there going to be a soon firmware update, fixing:

green band, wb inconsistencies, hickups, long uptime.

 

These are still the problems for me.

Not much though, but I am afraid that Leica will neglect further frmwr updates....

Some info, Guy?

 

 

 

Marko

[Gilles L.]

The only 'bugs' I am and have been experiencing since I purchased the camera are the WB inconsistencies (which don't bother me since I shoot raw), and the frequent rapid scrolling when I press the menu button. I've had the these two problems for the past three firmwares. Otherwise, I am fortunate to have not experience any of the other problems reported.