On a recent shoot, I was shooting with my K20D in manual mode when the rear e-dial stopped working. The dial would turn, but had no effect on zooming in on images during playback, and would not change the aperture value in any capture mode (my settings are such that my rear e-dial is
always assigned to adjust aperture – in every mode). Needless to say, this was a big pain in the arse, as I could not adequately adjust exposure and/or DOF. I double-checked
all the e-dial settings, turned the camera off & on, even removed the batteries to “reset” it, etc. Still no rear e-dial function. I found a work-around to finish that part of the shoot, but it wasn’t pretty. Then a little while later, out of habit (forgetting the e-dial wasn’t working), I zoomed in on an image and alas, the e-dial was working again. I have no idea how it fixed itself. The only thing I can think of was that I changed lenses at some point during the malfunction and thought perhaps that somehow remedied the situation – maybe dislodged some dust in the contacts or something. So ... ‘this ever happen to anyone? Did you figure out how/why it happened?
It seems like no matter how proficient I am with my equipment, how much I know/learn about the craft, how good o’ care I take of my gear ... there’s always that
one thing that goes wrong in every shoot. I’m getting pretty good at fixes and work-arounds on the fly, but it’s getting kinda’ old. Sigh.