So Frustrating!!!

[Franka373]

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Do you format in camera after SD card formatter or only SD?

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[lct]

8 minutes ago, Franka373 said:

Do you format in camera after SD card formatter or only SD?

I always format my memory cards with SD Card Formatter before inserting them in any camera. I may also format in camera depending upon circumstances. Typically i will do it in the M11 when i format the internal memory as well.

[mattcheol]

18 hours ago, M11 for me said:

I hope I do not shout too loudly: Yesterday I came home with a set of images: About half the images out of about 30 were upside down in Lightroom Classic. I never had that before . . . 🥲. No big issue but a clear bug.

on another thread I listed all a lot of my qualms with the M11 but I totally forgot about this one. This happened to me too! just about the entire LR import was upside down. 

*FTR I format in-camera and use a San Disk UHS-II 128GB card. 

Edited November 13, 2023 by mattcheol

[Fritz Fritz]

On 11/11/2023 at 12:56 PM, Al Brown said:

Saying "my M11 does not freeze", "reformat your cards" and "are you sure it is the camera" (lol) is really really really not helpful, gentlemen.
 

This. Some folks, myself included, get freezes even when running with no SD card at all. Additionally, even if the "fix" were to format the card using some specific card formatting software, that's on Leica and is still a real problem. At this price point the device shouldn't be sensitive to some arcane formatting (not to mention the fallacy of asserting that all formatting tools, including the one _on the camera_ are doing something wrong, except this one).

 

[Leica Filmmatic]

My M11 running current firmware locked up on me with no sd card in it yesterday.  Only happened once and the camera has been working fine since.  Didn’t have many freezes before 2.01 seems to be happening more frequent now.  Usually when I am moving too fast 

[Ted Lemon]

On 11/12/2023 at 12:04 PM, M11 for me said:

Yesterday I came home with a set of images: About half the images out of about 30 were upside down in Lightroom Classic. I never had that before . . . 🥲. No big issue but a clear bug.

About a year ago, I test-drove an M11 from a Leica shop, and half the images were upside down in LR. The shop assistant was perplexed. After reading the M11 issues here and seeing friends suffer, I am sticking with my MP240. I was planning to skip M10 to M11, but that may be M12 if it works better and is more reliable  - if I live long enough.  

Edited November 17, 2023 by Ted Lemon

[hmzimelka]

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7 hours ago, Leica Filmmatic said:

My M11 running current firmware locked up on me with no sd card in it yesterday.  Only happened once and the camera has been working fine since.  Didn’t have many freezes before 2.01 seems to be happening more frequent now.  Usually when I am moving too fast 

For me FW 1.6.1 was the most stable firmware for my camera. I've had more hangups and bugs with FW 2.0.1 than I've had in a long time! 

[londond]

50 minutes ago, hmzimelka said:

For me FW 1.6.1 was the most stable firmware for my camera. I've had more hangups and bugs with FW 2.0.1 than I've had in a long time! 

I agree.

[anickpick]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb hmzimelka:

For me FW 1.6.1 was the most stable firmware for my camera. I've had more hangups and bugs with FW 2.0.1 than I've had in a long time! 

I have two M11 cameras, both work flawlessly, both on FW 1.6.1. 

I will be careful not to ever update the firmware again, until it has proven itself a thousand times over.

[bcaslis]

I have never had an upside down image and never used SD formatter, only format the cards in the camera. No issues on FW 1.6.1 and 2.0.1 (so far).

[dugby]

11 hours ago, Ted Lemon said:

About a year ago, I test-drove an M11 from a Leica shop, and half the images were upside down in LR. The shop assistant was perplexed. After reading the M11 issues here and seeing friends suffer, I am sticking with my MP240. I was planning to skip M10 to M11, but that may be M12 if it works better and is more reliable  - if I live long enough. 

Edited November 17, 2023 by dugby
Deet

[Jammy Dodger]

Out again the other night, realized I was using a Sandisk UHS-1 so swapped to a Lexar UHS-11; no problems, camera worked like a charm 🙂

[jakontil]

On 11/17/2023 at 7:38 PM, hmzimelka said:

For me FW 1.6.1 was the most stable firmware for my camera. I've had more hangups and bugs with FW 2.0.1 than I've had in a long time! 

One of the reason im still sticking with 1.6.1 

[lct]

12 minutes ago, jakontil said:

One of the reason im still sticking with 1.6.1 

I hesitated too but the appeal of the center frame option of firmware 2.0.1 was too strong. Glad i did the move as i have no freezes and the wandering focus point of firmware 1.6.1 was painful.

[jakontil]

31 minutes ago, lct said:

I hesitated too but the appeal of the center frame option of firmware 2.0.1 was too strong. Glad i did the move as i have no freezes and the wandering focus point of firmware 1.6.1 was painful.

hi Ict, glad it's fine.. im sure the latest firmware improved in many ways, but im too comfortable right now with 1.6.1 but very honest opinion, I ain't just got the time to upgrade yet and nothing attractive to my usage to push just yet 

u know, I never feel the M11 as reliable as it is now since owning it back in early 2022, not that mine freezes on regular basis, but im glad we are here finally

[scott kirkpatrick]

  Firmware is an evolving organism.  All firmware has bugs (hopefully not many), and bugs get fixed only on the most recently released "stable" version of the firmware.  Asking a small team of developers to look at anything other than the version they have just shipped (so that they can put the fixes into the one they are now working on) is a lost cause.  Right now, the M11++ team would probably rather concentrate on all the wonderful functions that they can offer on the M12 in two years than fixing our pesky little bugs.

Perhaps we can help by trying to group the problems into as few categories as possible.  There are two sets of contexts:  when did it happen (e.g. shooting fast, right at power-on or while jumping rapidly from review to shooting), and what it did (e.g. freeze, but recover with a quick power off or battery-pop;).  I think we need to specify both if possible.  For example, having a series of shots emerge upside down in your editor of choice.  I haven't seen this in 2.0.1 but did see it once in 1.6.1.  It has happened to others and apparently still happens.  Was it triggered by a hasty shot, or occur with no change in the flow of the shoot?  Was it right at startup?  Did it end with a brief power-off (mine with 1.6.1 did) or did it stop with merely a pause between shots? 

Clarifying when our bugs occur is getting harder because the Arm processor in the so-called "Maestro" chip is doing half a dozen different threads at the same time.  For the best performance, this kind of software should stop and check if everything is ready only at the most critical times (like before it takes a picture).  And if a "my part is finished" signal gets lost, we have freezes.  If we all used the same SD card (SanDisk 128GB USB II, anyone?), life would be simpler, but I guess this must also be reported.

Bugs that fall into a clear category and are reported by multiple users tend to get fixed.

 

 

Edited November 18, 2023 by scott kirkpatrick

[jaapv]

I see a couple of newbie errors here..

1. settings will get lost if you do not save them in a user profile

2. with Leica you are expected to understand exposure - the camera will not think for you. 

3. freezes - yes, but they can be mitigated - see the relevant threads and they will be sorted.

Leica M is not a run-of-the mill digital camera . It is a 1950-ies analog manual camera that has been adapted to digital. Japanese brands are computers that have been adapted to talking photographs.

[scott kirkpatrick]

4 hours ago, jaapv said:

Leica M is not a run-of-the mill digital camera . It is a 1950-ies analog manual camera that has been adapted to digital. Japanese brands are computers that have been adapted to talking photographs.

I agree.  I still have and love my M2, purchased not-new at Willoughby's in 1969 for a great price (because, I learned much later, it had spent some time under water).

I think the "Das Wesentlich" theme (or fetish) is a good thing, leading to three product lines with an amazing amount of common control philosophy and structure.  Little computers find that very hard to do.  Shifting between Leica's product lines and models is fairly easy.  A lot happens in the first three seconds after the current cameras are powered on, or asked to wake up from a standby state.  I found with 1.6 firmware that shooting in the first half second after power-on could cause a freeze, but that is fixed now in 2.0.n.  Funny stuff can still happen in the first three seconds sometimes, so I don't turn my M11 off when I am about.  I give it a friendly half-squeeze every now and then when it might need to stay alert.  And sharing information about what you were doing just before something bad happens can help to resolve these problems.

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[DadDadDaddyo]

jaapv and s.kirkp are offering experienced and useful insight here.

We do not have controlled conditions that are required for testing, within, or rather, across this ad hoc community of interested persons. 

This makes it very, very, very difficult to pin down clear causes and clear effects. The reports that folks post here tend to cluster around perceived similar effects, but that doesn't mean that the conditions under which they are testing their cameras are consistent enough to draw conclusions from.

If ten of us met, and placed our cameras on a long table, and then only one person went down the table trying to perform *exactly the same procedure with each camera, exact, down to the timing of each button press, and videoed each procedure, with high quality audio, and time code on the frames, all of that would be the *beginning* of paying attention to the prerequisites for controlled conditions. The beginning, not the end. There would still almost certainly be variables at play that would produce differing results. 

We've individually produced reports attempting to identify a bunch of variables: firmware version, SD card make and size and speed and formatting protocol, lens detection state, settings stored in profile, body serial number, battery charge; but there may be unknown or unreported or unnoticed factors relating to the condition of the body, the conditions of the testing (including timing on control inputs). The list goes on, and grows with each anecdotal report. 

So we can't really validate what each other are doing. We tend to seize on perceived similarities in reports, making it easy to miss critical differences in conditions that may have profound effects. Cause is tricky. 

In other words, we do not, collectively, have our arms around Cause and Effect in these threads. And it's very, very, very difficult to draw conclusions from all of this. 

Prior to retirement I worked for twenty-plus years in IT support for research at an R1 university. I can tell you that the researchers I worked with would not submit papers saying, "...and I was really careful to press the button the same way each time so I'd be real sure my testing was precise..."

No. Instead, they'd build a test rig, a machine, that could press a button the same way each time, and do it hundreds and thousands of times, to a knowable degree of precision. And that would be *just* to test, say, the timing of the pressing of that button. That's for one variable. 

We can iterate our way to some understandings here, but we can only each do our own testing ourselves to see if a suggestion someone makes can help in our own circumstances. We really can't generalize from our own results to claim insight into another person's issues with a camera, or assume that what worked for our use case must work for theirs.

For that reason, you'll find the most useful posts here are not about results or answers, but rather are explanatory about the nature of hardware, and software, and development, and invention, and where all those things meet.

 

Edited November 19, 2023 by DadDadDaddyo
Fixed a typo, and changed "likely" to "almost certainly"

[elmars]

vor 15 Stunden schrieb scott kirkpatrick:

  Firmware is an evolving organism.  All firmware has bugs (hopefully not many), and bugs get fixed only on the most recently released "stable" version of the firmware.  Asking a small team of developers to look at anything other than the version they have just shipped (so that they can put the fixes into the one they are now working on) is a lost cause.  Right now, the M11++ team would probably rather concentrate on all the wonderful functions that they can offer on the M12 in two years than fixing our pesky little bugs.

Perhaps we can help by trying to group the problems into as few categories as possible.  There are two sets of contexts:  when did it happen (e.g. shooting fast, right at power-on or while jumping rapidly from review to shooting), and what it did (e.g. freeze, but recover with a quick power off or battery-pop;).  I think we need to specify both if possible.  For example, having a series of shots emerge upside down in your editor of choice.  I haven't seen this in 2.0.1 but did see it once in 1.6.1.  It has happened to others and apparently still happens.  Was it triggered by a hasty shot, or occur with no change in the flow of the shoot?  Was it right at startup?  Did it end with a brief power-off (mine with 1.6.1 did) or did it stop with merely a pause between shots? 

Clarifying when our bugs occur is getting harder because the Arm processor in the so-called "Maestro" chip is doing half a dozen different threads at the same time.  For the best performance, this kind of software should stop and check if everything is ready only at the most critical times (like before it takes a picture).  And if a "my part is finished" signal gets lost, we have freezes.  If we all used the same SD card (SanDisk 128GB USB II, anyone?), life would be simpler, but I guess this must also be reported.

Bugs that fall into a clear category and are reported by multiple users tend to get fixed.

 

 

Perhaps that is a very important idea: The camera gets "confused" during the start-up process. I never have freezes. But I also always have my camera on standby for 30 minutes, so that it is actually always "awake". Perhaps those who are affected by freezes could switch the camera to 30 or 60m standby and see if anything improves or changes. In any case, the camera battery has enough capacity to shoot all day with 30 min standby. Jono Slack does the same. He also has no freezes.