A7s reset itself to 1280 X 720!!!!!

[Peter Rush]

So as you only get an indication of frame rate on the LCD screen and not frame size I was happily filming away a bridal prep with a manual tamron lens no problem. When I went down to get shots of guests arriving I switch to my native Zeiss 24-70 and noticed that when I started recording the camera zoomed in a little - almost like it was switching to APS-C - major panic as i could not work out what was going on. I set APS-C to 'Off' and it was still happening.

So I had no choice but to reset the camera - absolute PITA as all my configured functions and buttons reset themselves.

Now looking back at the footage it seems the stuff I'd shot earlier is 1280X720 with a frame rate of 100 despite it saying 50p on the LCD - WHAT!!!!!

How did this happen - when I'd used the camera previously I was shooting 1920 X 1080

I can't see where you can manually set frame size as it seems tied to which coded you choose - had the camera set itself to AVCHD instead of X-AVCS?????

Can you set the camera to display frame size on the LCD screen?

[Noa Put]

I don't have a a7s but I have a rx10 and my experience with this camera has been that it has displayed some very weird behavior that I could not explain and which I was not able to replicate again. I feel it's almost something typical to Sony because they cram so much functionality into so little camera's that it looks like the camera gets confused. Not everyone gets this but there sure are some "monday made" Sony camera's out there.

What I have experienced so far which I was not able to repeat.

- The lens returned to it's previous zoom position when I switched the camera off and back on. (That is not supposed to happen and it did it like this for a few weeks and then disappeared)
- The focus was locked at a distance of 20 meter, camera set to manual focus and over a period of 10 minutes the focus shifted gradually to about 10 cm in front of the camera without me touching anything. This happened once and was not able to replicate it)
- The auto white balance shifted all the way to red, this is a setting you can change in the menu but requires digging deeper into the menu to activate that option and changing the whitebalance offset also requires several pushes on the menu button. This happened once.

[Peter Rush]

Exactly - very strange - I never shoot 100 frame rate and as far as I can see it's not easy to accidentally set it :/

[Dave Blackhurst]

Just to add a little to the "Monday cam" conversation...

The RX100IV I picked up "lightly used" (really NEW, with about 50 pix on it...) had a bad 4 way selector - it was clearly a bad switch from the factory, had almost no "clik" response on two of the four directions, and none on another, though if you pressed deliberately, it "worked"... sort of. I have a couple "parts" cams, so replacing the switch was a short painless procedure... instantly "felt right" again and worked as expected... I've seen bad switches before on another Alpha I owned (sent that one in for repair).

SO, yep, it's possible to get a cam that passed "QC" that shouldn't have. For me, I know how a Sony camera should "feel" and behave, and something like that switch is immediately obvious... but it's entirely possible that in a highly complex piece of electronics that there can and will be "quirks"... I've seen the same sort of thing with laptop computers - three "identical" machines can have variances!

Plus there's the "human factor", I've accidentally set things wrong a "few" times... only to later discover the camera didn't produce the results I THOUGHT I was getting, and that it was capable of.... turned out to be a "loose nut" behind the lens <wink>! Haven't got a permanent and reliable fix for that condition yet!

[Noa Put]

My sony nex-ea50 had 2 ways to go into the menu, on top of the camera with a dial and on the side with another button, the top dial stopped working after a month but because I still had access to the menu with the side button I decided to finish the wedding season with the camera and then send it in for repair. During that season I tried a few more times and the dial was dead.

After the wedding season I however decided to sell the camera and not send it in for repair and when the guy came who I sold it to (a member on this forum) I told him about the malfunctioning dial but that he still had one year of warranty left to send the camera in for repair, I showed him the dial that didn't work and when I pressed it, it did work again...Just like that. :)

[Dmitri Zigany]

When shooting 100fps it's doing crop to 720p.
The number inside the film icon is 50 though indicating the XAVCS 50mbps codec. This icon says 50 in both 25p, 50p and 100p. Maybe that confused you in the heat of the moment?