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03-06-2014, 10:23 PM   #1
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K3 Firmware 1.03 and mirror flap

Hello All,

I am wondering if anyone can confirm whether or not the new firmware 1.03 for K3 resolved the issue with the mirror flap/machine gunning/flutter issue.

Best,

Little Ray

03-06-2014, 11:43 PM   #2
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We will need to wait for everyone to upgrade and use the cameras for a while since this was an irregular occurrence for most people. Fingers are crossed.

Jack
03-07-2014, 05:06 AM   #3
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still flapping?

Hi there,

updated my K-3 last night to 1.03 and did some test shoots with a fully loaded battery.

This morning, again I did some shoots and at one point I got the mirror flapping (machinegun style):

- AF the object with camera shutter button half way pressed down
- fully pushed the button and the gun started firing
- I was not able to intervene (neither pressing buttons nor using the on/off switch could help), and it did some shooting for at least 10 seconds
- when I decided to pull the battery out I suddenly stopped
- must be hundred frames, but it did not take any pictures

setup:
- K-3 with battery grip attached
- battery grip was switched off
- battery was mounted in the grip (no second battery in camera)
- battery was drained a little bit from previously being fully charged
- used the 18-135 with AF to focus an object
- repeatedly used half-way shutter button for focusing (this time not the dedicated AF button)
- fired the shot and got the mirror flapping

I was not able to reproduce the event.

Cheers,
Seb
03-07-2014, 07:47 AM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by seppel13 Quote
Hi there,

updated my K-3 last night to 1.03 and did some test shoots with a fully loaded battery.

This morning, again I did some shoots and at one point I got the mirror flapping (machinegun style):

- AF the object with camera shutter button half way pressed down
- fully pushed the button and the gun started firing
- I was not able to intervene (neither pressing buttons nor using the on/off switch could help), and it did some shooting for at least 10 seconds
- when I decided to pull the battery out I suddenly stopped
- must be hundred frames, but it did not take any pictures

setup:
- K-3 with battery grip attached
- battery grip was switched off
- battery was mounted in the grip (no second battery in camera)
- battery was drained a little bit from previously being fully charged
- used the 18-135 with AF to focus an object
- repeatedly used half-way shutter button for focusing (this time not the dedicated AF button)
- fired the shot and got the mirror flapping

I was not able to reproduce the event.

Cheers,
Seb
I am only a new person on here and not a experienced photographer but I was thinking that if you have this mirro flapping/machine gun action happening is it because of having the batter grip attached and possibly too much power going into the camera body? Seb have you tried the new firmware and setup as above but without the battery grip? I could be totally wrong! I have not had this occur to me at all on my K-3.

03-07-2014, 09:22 AM   #5
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Did you use Live View?
03-07-2014, 12:46 PM   #6
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Also happened to me

Hello

I was out one morning - with a limited 70 on the k-3 and firmware 1.02, no battery-grip, guessing that the battery was at about 50%, suddenly while still focusing the shutter went into machine gun style, I switched off the camera - but the shutter still continued for a few seconds before stopping. I turned the camera back on, no pictures were taken during the crazy shutter movements, and haven't seen it happening since. have taken about 1000 pictures since this happened - and now I've upgraded to the 1.03.
03-09-2014, 12:11 PM   #7
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QuoteQuote:
Seb have you tried the new firmware and setup as above but without the battery grip? I could be totally wrong! I have not had this occur to me at all on my K-3.
This weekend I was out for shooting and the failure could not be reproduced. I switched my setup ... K-3 with and without BG. I think as this mirror flap problem was reported to happen somewhat randomized and is hard to repoduce
QuoteQuote:
and haven't seen it happening since. have taken about 1000 pictures since this happened - and now I've upgraded to the 1.03.
and I/we just have to wait.

QuoteQuote:
Did you use Live View?
No Live View.

Cheers,
Seb

03-11-2014, 09:53 PM   #8
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Posted this in my own thread on the same issue, but here ya go...

03-11-2014, 11:18 PM   #9
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QuoteOriginally posted by JASMAZ77 Quote
I am only a new person on here and not a experienced photographer but I was thinking that if you have this mirro flapping/machine gun action happening is it because of having the batter grip attached and possibly too much power going into the camera body?.
Ive been following the threads on here and else where re: lockup/mirror flap issues (even though my k3 doesnt have this issue)..

From what ive read of owners experiences it doesnt appear to be battery grip or card slot related... And the battery grip provides additional mAH (i.e. capacity/running time) the voltage is constant whether using in camera battery or battery grip attached..
04-22-2014, 11:24 PM   #10
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solved ... for me

Hello again,

after a couple of time with my K-3 (last firmware available) I never had this issue again.

At least I was able to reproduce this "failure" as a result of voltage drop, by using "cheap" AA batteries in the grip.
No problems with with original D-LI 90 battery as well as "black power" eneloops.

Cheers
04-23-2014, 12:00 AM   #11
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physicists required for the following is in pure layman's terms. each battery has a characteristic, that describes how fast it can return the accumulated energy (internal resistance, perhaps?), meaning, there's a measurable delay till the required power (amperage*voltage) is provided to the "consumer". I wonder, if the issue could be caused by that.. quite some cases, mine included, indicate a power draining activity happening before the issue. in my case - repeated attempts to focus on the moving subject, and the battery hadn't even been through the first charge/discharge cycle.
could this be related to that? if the cpu/mirror mechanism is really sensitive to that, probably this is what tips it off. OTOH, that would mean, these mechanisms have a sort of hardware design flaw, they should have "looser" tolerances
04-23-2014, 02:52 AM   #12
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QuoteOriginally posted by karro Quote
physicists required for the following is in pure layman's terms. each battery has a characteristic, that describes how fast it can return the accumulated energy (internal resistance, perhaps?), meaning, there's a measurable delay till the required power (amperage*voltage) is provided to the "consumer". I wonder, if the issue could be caused by that.. quite some cases, mine included, indicate a power draining activity happening before the issue. in my case - repeated attempts to focus on the moving subject, and the battery hadn't even been through the first charge/discharge cycle.
could this be related to that? if the cpu/mirror mechanism is really sensitive to that, probably this is what tips it off. OTOH, that would mean, these mechanisms have a sort of hardware design flaw, they should have "looser" tolerances
It is known that Pentax bodies wil Flip the mirror for the following reasons (amongst others)

1 over voltage (on-board regulator burn't out)
2 under voltage (Brown out )
3 mirror out of sync with shutter
4 unseated mirror (foreign body in path)

So you summation on poor battery performance is valid and even likely for a un-cycled dl-190
I don't believe cause #1 has been seen on the k3 but 2 certainly has and it seems 'new' dl-190 may initially struggle with the load the k3 takes until they've been cycled a couple of times..

Additionally the battery grip does not provide increase voltage or power as it is not run in parallel but one or the other, I assume so AA batteries can be used without removing the dl-190 from the body.
04-23-2014, 08:06 AM   #13
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QuoteOriginally posted by awaldram Quote
It is known that Pentax bodies wil Flip the mirror for the following reasons (amongst others)

1 over voltage (on-board regulator burn't out)
2 under voltage (Brown out )
3 mirror out of sync with shutter
4 unseated mirror (foreign body in path)

So you summation on poor battery performance is valid and even likely for a un-cycled dl-190
I don't believe cause #1 has been seen on the k3 but 2 certainly has and it seems 'new' dl-190 may initially struggle with the load the k3 takes until they've been cycled a couple of times..

Additionally the battery grip does not provide increase voltage or power as it is not run in parallel but one or the other, I assume so AA batteries can be used without removing the dl-190 from the body.
That's a possibility. There were reports of the fault occurring using the mains power adapter but it could be that the adapter is also not able to supply some peak loads. I have ordered some connectors for the external power input, so I might be able to get some data on current draw some time after I construct my own adapter. Interestingly I found the camera will work powered solely by the Pentax mains adapter (which I bought recently) with no battery installed. I thought I recalled reading that the camera wouldn't power on without the battery.
04-24-2014, 11:50 PM   #14
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QuoteOriginally posted by jhmos Quote
That's a possibility. There were reports of the fault occurring using the mains power adapter but it could be that the adapter is also not able to supply some peak loads. I have ordered some connectors for the external power input, so I might be able to get some data on current draw some time after I construct my own adapter. Interestingly I found the camera will work powered solely by the Pentax mains adapter (which I bought recently) with no battery installed. I thought I recalled reading that the camera wouldn't power on without the battery.
Yep thats interesting and does seem to confound my theories.

Seems unlikley a switch mode PSU could successfully power a computer without a decent smattering of large capacitor to smooth the ride.

I'm sure the camera doesn;t have those in body and given the size of the PSU find it unlikley that woudl either.

Having said that I have seen it before where a laptop was quite happy to post bios running from PSU alone but could not boot as the load of the hard drive crow barred the the power.

So I think the 'camera stil flops with psu' is probably a red herring and indictates a design miss in that it should not power up on PSU alone.]

With the battery providing the power resevoir the camera needs to ride high loads.

If we assume that then a faulty or substandard battery could still be the issue for those who experience flopping even with psu attached.

If we pursuade a represntative number of those seeing the issue to try a different battery we coudl maybe get some reliable data on the problem.

Getting a graph of the load will certainly help so anything you can porduce would be exceedingly useful.

even if we can only define load factors it'll indicate when brown out may occur and if those predicted risk points actually match data then we have our smoking gun.

My main suspicion is still battery for those repeat offending K3's , and thnk it may be a contributory factor for the one-off especially the few day old cameras.

If we add the data here https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/172-pentax-k-3/242792-k-3-power-issue.html into the mix then it appears there was a bad batch of batteries at least in the US around the period the grip became available. So is reasonable to assume those same batch of batteries made there way onto k3 kits.

Last edited by awaldram; 04-25-2014 at 01:14 AM.
04-25-2014, 07:28 AM   #15
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It may be a power issue, but I'm fairly convinced it's not a bad batch of batteries.

The reason I say so is simply this:

I've had quite a few of these batteries (all genuine Pentax). Battery #1 and #2 are as old as the original K5 (3 years old). Battery #3 came with the K-01 (bought 1 year ago). Battery #4 came with the first K3 bought in November. Battery #5 is from the K5-II that Pentax loaned me (don't know age). Battery #6, in late December, came from Pentax directly, to attempt to reproduce the problem with the newest battery possible. Battery #7 is an extra I had purchased sometime last year (early 2013). Battery #7 came with the second K3, that I got in February of this year.

So I've had a whole variety of genuine Pentax batteries with varying ages, and all of them produced the mirror flapping.

And then there's at least one report of the issue happening with the Power Adaptor. It seems to happen with or without grip, with AA batteries, 3rd party or genuine Pentax batteries.

So I'm fairly confident, that the power supply itself doesn't seem to be the problem. If it's a power issue, it's on the camera side, and the way it's handling the power load. The EXIF data from photos doesn't seem to be capturing any spike or drop in power that I can tell, all seems normal there, so if there's a spike or drop that the camera can't handle, it's not coming through the EXIF data.

I don't at all think it's wrong to investigate power issue... all avenues should be explored. However, a bad batch of batteries would have to extend to basically all batteries manufactured since the original K5 to coincide with my own experience, and wouldn't explain the issue showing up with the power adaptor.

I would seriously like to know what is the difference between the K5-II/s bodies and the K3 as to show this fault in the K3 but not the K5-II/s bodies. To me, it seems, this is an important area of investigation. It may still come down to a power issue, but there would obviously be something different in how the two cameras are handling that power load, if it's indeed power related.

An interesting post on the issue with the original K-5 related to the aperture mechanism and power. Worth a read if you want.


Oh, and JHMos, was it that the camera wouldn't power on, or just wouldn't hold settings? I seem to remember that it had something to do with retaining settings after being powered off, not that it wouldn't run at all... but I might be remembering wrong.

Last edited by DRabbit; 04-25-2014 at 08:27 AM.
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