SL2 "Menu" Malfunction

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I took my almost New SL2 and shot two series of test shots with the Sigma 18-35mm lens I bought yesterday. Everything worked fine, but, when I went to format the memory card, the menu would not come up. Instead, the wi-fi menu (the one that pops up when you push the dedicated wi-fi button). Wi-fi would connect, but live view hung up.

Other than that, it was working fine, live view, or viewfinder mode, all the other buttons work as they should.

I went online, setup a repair, boxed up the camera along with the original receipt and RMA paperwork for return to Canon Monday.

This is the first Canon camera that has failed, its probably just a coincidence that it failed with the Sigma lens mounted. Of course, I tried different lenses, removed memory card and battery, all the tricks to no avail.

It should be back in a couple weeks or less, It should arrive Monday.

 

[ajfotofilmagem]

Well. If you tested with other lenses, and the problem remains, you can not blame the Sigma lens.

In the past, I had problems with my T2i, which did not properly "wake up" the flash 430EX ii, which came back from standby without reading TTL, while everything was perfect with my other cameras.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I have a sigma Dock on order, it will likely be here tomorrow or Monday. It focuses sharply with DPAF, pretty blurry with PDAF.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Sorry to hear about your woes, hopefully Canon will be able to get to the bottom of this and fix it permanently.

On the subject of the dock, I have one for my 17-70mm C, I haven't tried for a while, but I found it very frustrating, I was able to get AFMA numbers out of my 7D (run once for 17mm, once for 70mm) and even then knowing which way it needed to go and having rough values (the Σ values seem different from the Canon values) it never seemed to work out with an improvement.
It was however very easy to worsen the situation so I wish you the best of luck.
I ended up leaving it alone after a reset to factory and on the 7DII it seems ok.

Cheers, Graham.

I have a sigma Dock on order, it will likely be here tomorrow or Monday. It focuses sharply with DPAF, pretty blurry with PDAF.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Sorry to hear about your woes, hopefully Canon will be able to get to the bottom of this and fix it permanently.

On the subject of the dock, I have one for my 17-70mm C, I haven't tried for a while, but I found it very frustrating, I was able to get AFMA numbers out of my 7D (run once for 17mm, once for 70mm) and even then knowing which way it needed to go and having rough values (the Σ values seem different from the Canon values) it never seemed to work out with an improvement.
It was however very easy to worsen the situation so I wish you the best of luck.
I ended up leaving it alone after a reset to factory and on the 7DII it seems ok.

Cheers, Graham.

I have a sigma Dock on order, it will likely be here tomorrow or Monday. It focuses sharply with DPAF, pretty blurry with PDAF.

I have no experience with the dock, and, of course, the SL2 does not have AFMA. The lens definitely does not focus accurately at infinity with PDAF, but its sharp with DPAF, so to use it with PDAF and get sharp images, It will need adjustment.

The photos are on my computer out in the studio in the recycle bin, but they are pretty blurry at 100% versus sharp for DPAF. At close distances, the defocus is more subtle. I guess they are still on the SD card as well, since the camera would not let me format it. I just took out the card and the battery and sent the bare camera back. It could be a electronics issue, or a defective cable. I suspect that the buttons in that area share a common cable, so it could be simple. Since its new, I did not want to fool with it.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I checked the tracking number this morning, this afternoon I received this email. As far as I can tell, they duplicated the issue.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Sorry to hear about your woes, hopefully Canon will be able to get to the bottom of this and fix it permanently.

On the subject of the dock, I have one for my 17-70mm C, I haven't tried for a while, but I found it very frustrating, I was able to get AFMA numbers out of my 7D (run once for 17mm, once for 70mm) and even then knowing which way it needed to go and having rough values (the Σ values seem different from the Canon values) it never seemed to work out with an improvement.
It was however very easy to worsen the situation so I wish you the best of luck.
I ended up leaving it alone after a reset to factory and on the 7DII it seems ok.

Cheers, Graham.

I have a sigma Dock on order, it will likely be here tomorrow or Monday. It focuses sharply with DPAF, pretty blurry with PDAF.

I received my dock yesterday, and today decided to try it. You are right, its frustrating, but I was learning.

Since my camera is being repaired, I mounted the lens to my 5D MK IV and discovered it needed a AFMA of +18 when used near mfd at 35mm. I also found that DPAF is not perfectly accurate at that range, about 3 clicks to the left using the Canon Utilities AF fixes that. Its so close that it doesn't matter, but it can be improved. There is no way that I can do better with manual focus using the focus ring, I spent a lot of time at 10X trying.

So I put +18 into the lens via the dock for 35mm and the correct distance, and found a very good match, +17 might have been better, but it was very close to perfect.

So, for determining the settings with my 5D MK IV, I can use Focal at up to 4 distances and 4 focal lengths if I actually wanted to, and put those numbers in the dock. Its basically 1 to 1 from what I see, but I can always run the Focal tests again once the lens is updated to see how close it is.

Unfortunately, the SL-2 does not have AFMA, so its a very long and tedious process if the corrections from the 5D MK IV are not accurate for the SL2. I can always use AFMA in the 5D MK IV and optimize the lens for the SL2 and get reasonably good results, I'm sure.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I received a email from Canon this afternoon, my SL2 is repaired and on its way back for a Tuesday delivery. So, from the day I sent it (Last Friday) to expected return is 7 working days it was in repair for 2-3 days, it was received Tuesday afternoon, and picked up by Fedex Friday afternoon.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Mt Spokane.
That is good news and pretty good service, hopefully that will be the last of your problems and you will get long and reliable service from it.

Cheers, Graham.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I hope so too. I'm considering giving it to my daughter and getting a 80D which is easier for me to hold. I'm not sure she wants a replacement for her old XTi. Many did not know it, but the XTi has adjustable autofocus using a allen wrench to adjust the sub mirror set screw stop. Many years ago, I adjusted it 2 clicks and it was much sharper. It was basically mechanical AFMA.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Reikan FoCal did reply to my question about the SL2 and the Sigma Dock. My plan is to calibrate the 18-35mm lens to my 5D MK IV, put the settings into the dock, then see how close it is on my SL2. I can use DPAF to compare the two and see if its front or rear focusing and adjust. Its indeed a very difficult process.

"With FoCal Pro and release 2.5 we removed any type of file lock so you can import the SL2 files into FoCal.

I can't think of a reasonable way to calibrate with the Sigma Dock combined with the SL2 - but then I'm not sure you need to either, I will include our Sigma Dock notes and then add some specific thoughts toward the end


FoCal can be used with the Sigma Dock. Easiest way to think of it is this: the normal camera/lens calibration is a fine tune setting held in the camera and FoCal can be used to work out the best value for this setting. With the Sigma Dock you now have a lot more points of adjustment and they must be set inside the lens rather than inside the camera.
To get an idea of what is involved I’ve linked to some posts where users describe calibrating using the Sigma Dock with the help of FoCal, http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3809354 and the related thread linked by tektrader where they talk in more detail about the steps. More threads which talk about dock calibration using FoCal are https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4031928 and https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4052613 and another more recent thread at https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4083573

We don't have an official written down procedure or tutorial video (yet!) but from what we understand FoCal can be useful for Sigma lens calibration. We'll need to do our own tests and more research using multiple different Sigma lenses before we'll have an official procedure that we guarantee will work in all cases.

Different Sigma lenses require difference calibration distances and are given in the Sigma Dock software. The distance, especially for the close in distances should be fairly accurately measured (measure to the sensor plane usually indicated on the top of the camera).

FoCal generally expects the target to take up between 20%-90% of the vertical frame. With nearer distances you might find a standard printed target works fine for this, if the target is taking up most or all of the screen you can re-print the target smaller as needed to ensure that it still fits inside the 90% with the closest distance.

With further distances and indeed with the 'infinity' setting it's unlikely you can print a FoCal target large enough for this calibration. The "infinity question" as I'm calling it is an interesting one(!)

I think the best way round is to find a natural or environmental target and use that instead. So turn off the function where FoCal expects a target ("Preferences" > "Tests" you can tell FoCal not to look for the specific target design at all by setting "Target Validation" to "No Target Validation").

A 'natural target' would be anything with high contrast edges in both the vertical and horizontal axis. Perhaps a large road sign with text on it, or a high rise apartment block that has strong defined lines (say window frames).

This is the approach we've come up with as a suggestion for now, one of the things we want to do is provide more information to users and this will be happening soon.

Essentially the expected process would be the calibrate (using FoCal) the lens at a specific distance (as given by Sigma in their user interface) and then try to dial out that adjustment. The end goal is the camera set AFMA ends up at 0 when the camera/lens is calibrated using FoCal and all the adjustment is entered instead within the Sigma Dock settings and held inside the lens itself.

It's hopeful (and there is some evidence to suggest) that once a relationship is found between AFMA / camera fine tune value and Sigma Dock calibration units that relationship holds true for further adjustments on that same lens.

Specific to the SL2 question, the approach suggested above won't really work for the SL2 - since it's impossible to move the SL2 by small known adjustments (no AFMA setting!). Further though I don't think you'd need to calibrate in the same way, the theory goes that the Sigma Dock adjustments effectively dial out lens inconsistencies.

Once the lens is calibrated on one body with the Dock and adjustment dialed into the lens further adjustment inside the lens shouldn't be required once the lens is moved to a different camera (though the new camera may need a single AFMA to resolve any camera specific tolerances).

The only way I can think to possibly use the Sigma Dock adjustment with the SL2 would be extremely time consuming and not something I'd recommend, you'd have to input a specific adjustment on the Dock, (say -20) take images (defocusing between each) - save those files then do same for other adjustment values. To feed them into FoCal you can rename the files so anything at -20 - call -20_image_Nnn and so on."

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Do I correctly remember you saying that you have DSLR Controller?
If so I think I would start by using the manual focus control set to the smallest increments, try stepping say 5 clicks distant and then work towards 5 clicks on the close side one Click at a time with a shot in each position then put those in FoCal and have them analysed put those in the lens via the dock and check again, a few repeats of this should give you an idea of the correlation between 1 click with the DSLR Controller and 1 correction unit on the dock.
Just don't forget that if you hit a hard focus stop on the lens it will throw out the increments, i.e. If you hit the lens end stop at infinity 3 clicks out DSLR Controller will not register the lens not moving for the next 2 clicks.
Also you may need to calculate the correlation between DSLR Controller increments and dock correction units at all four focal length correction points, then again you might not, it is 01:10 and I can't get my head around that bit and I just thought this up whilst thinking that I might try correcting my Σ17-70mm for my 40D based on your questions and FoCal's answers!
Basically just thinking out loud as it were and this may be more work than it is worth! ;D

Cheers, Graham.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Do I correctly remember you saying that you have DSLR Controller?
If so I think I would start by using the manual focus control set to the smallest increments, try stepping say 5 clicks distant and then work towards 5 clicks on the close side one Click at a time with a shot in each position then put those in FoCal and have them analysed put those in the lens via the dock and check again, a few repeats of this should give you an idea of the correlation between 1 click with the DSLR Controller and 1 correction unit on the dock.
Just don't forget that if you hit a hard focus stop on the lens it will throw out the increments, i.e. If you hit the lens end stop at infinity 3 clicks out DSLR Controller will not register the lens not moving for the next 2 clicks.
Also you may need to calculate the correlation between DSLR Controller increments and dock correction units at all four focal length correction points, then again you might not, it is 01:10 and I can't get my head around that bit and I just thought this up whilst thinking that I might try correcting my Σ17-70mm for my 40D based on your questions and FoCal's answers!
Basically just thinking out loud as it were and this may be more work than it is worth! ;D

Cheers, Graham.

Yes, I tried that tethered using Canon Utilities and my 5D MK IV to see how well it worked, it works pretty much the same way.

When I get to the part where I need long distances, I'll do it outdoors and either use canon utilities or DSLR controller, I have a platform that clamps to a tripod leg that will hold either. MY Laptop has a larger screen than my tablet, so Canon Utilities might work better. It is a hassle focusing with PDAF, then starting DSLR Controller or Canon utilities and finding out how many clicks to get good focus. The trick is to record it all accurately and put it into the lens, and repeat. I am hoping to get a head start by first adjusting the lens with my 5D IV AFMA values.