Exposure problem is battery related . . .

[Guest Walt]

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I recently had a camera not respond when I turned on the power switch: the red record light flashed but nothing else lit up and no controls were operative. I removed and reinstalled the battery with no change, but a different battery fixed the problem. I marked this battery and recharged it, though it had shown three bars when in the camera (before the failure).

 

Today I tried using the battery again. The camera would start up normally, but almost every single first shot of a sequence showed severe misexposure. This happened regardless of whether the camea was asleep on the first shot or not, though the meter itself was always dormant. After four or five of these, I replaced the battery with a new one and the problem was fixed. A retest of the suspect battery reinstated the problem. A retest with another battery cured the problem. When the meter is dormant I normally fire the shutter without hesitation and I used this approach on all tests and retests.

 

So, a "bad" battery seems capable of producing apparently unrelated, varied problems. This is the only one of my five batteries that has produced any problems, and I have never "calibrated" any of them with a full discharge, which I believe is bad for lithium batteries. A personal contact at Garmin (the GPS maker) is adamant that lithium batteries should not be fully discharged.

 

If Leica is aware of problems like this--and they certainly should be by now--they must publish a list of "known problems" and make it available to all M8 owners. I, and many others on the forum, have spent way too much time troubleshooting problems, only to find out that they are known and familiar. Leica's "close to the chest" approach with the M8 and its various problems is very disturbing. Ditto for their firware revisions, which require endless, rediculous speculation from users.

 

LEICA: HOW ABOUT ASSIGNING AN INFORMED COMPANY EMPLOYEE TO TALK TO US? The corporate uncommunicativeness and inconsistent, incomplete, often incoherent, second-hand relay of information through a few forum members is unacceptable.

 

Walt

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[marknorton]

Your friend at Garmin is correct, lithium batteries should not be completely discharged, makes them difficult to recharge. Electronic devices should shutdown before the battery gets to that state. The nominal battery voltage is 3.7v, but this can be 4.2v on a fully charged battery and 3.55v at the point where the camera shuts dowm.

[dpattinson]

Interesting, I will try to see if battery makes any difference to that problem on my camera. I haven't noticed any correlation so far - and I can always reproduce the mis-exposure, but maybe I have two dodgy batteries.

[Eoin]

Was there not some suggestion (Guy Mancuso I think) that the battery should be calibrated in the camera by disabling the auto shut off and letting the battery run down.

 

FWIW I have noticed the 3 full bars on one of my batteries and then it's flat 2 min later, possibly it's the newer battery which has never been calibrated but I never noticed this prior to FW 1.107.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Several of us have monitored the discharge of Leica batteries. The standard method is to defeat auto shutoff, and then just leave the camera switched on. The camera will shut itself off when the external voltage reaches about 3.55 volts, which is comfortably above the regime where any damage is done. Recharging fully from this point does help to guarantee that the battery and camera will interact correctly in the future. It doesn't need to be done often, and I don't see any harm in it.

 

scott

[Guest Walt]

I should have said, though I cannot establish a causal relationship, that I have had none of these problems prior to the most recent firmware update. If it weren't for the somewhat improved playback function, which is the only improvement I've noticed, I'd revert to the previous firmware.

 

On the "conditioning procedure," I have five batteries and two bodies and this one battery, in both cameras, is creating the only problem. So I suspect it's just a bad battery and not the relationship of either body to batteries in general. And I'm not at all confident that the camera will actually shut off before flattening the battery, but I don't know that.

 

So here we are speculating, rumoring and conjecturing again about something Leica knows about and should communicate about clearly, completely and directly. Guy Mancuso is not, to my knowledge, an employee of Leica and he has no consistent responsibility to communicate clearly or completely on behalf of Leica Camera.