Light leak on 5D3 IS a big issue, and should embarrass Canon

[PhilDrinkwater]

I realize I’m stirring up a hornet’s nest by saying this, but here goes:

Why don’t we hear about this with the D800, D4, or D700? How is it that Nikon managed to make their upper LCD displays not leak light into their cameras? Do they have access to better light blocking materials than Canon? Of course not.

(Again, I’m not saying I think Nikon makes better cameras - they don’t - but this is clearly an aspect where Canon dropped the ball. I’m glad to see they intend to fix this defect. But as a consumer dropping $3500 on a camera body, I want to buy one that comes from the factory without the defect!).

Clearly Canon didn't drop the ball. It's a tiny issue. Nikon have their own issues, for example http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1100467

 

[sailingsilkeborg]

I don't see anything harsh or out of line about the OP's view on this. This isn't about being a "good guy" or demonstrating that you can grin and bear the small stuff. And it's not about expecting a perfect product, either. It's about the expectation that for your money, which here, is plenty, you'll receive what we call a "merchantable" product.

The light leak seems to admittedly be a flaw, correctable or not. With all bigger money DSLR's, the manufacturer of the product needs to know that flaws that are incompatible with the basic object of the product aren't going to be considered small stuff. Likewise, loyalists and people that pride themselves in "not sweating the small stuff" can be mum if they choose to, but they shouldn't be squelching polite commentary about such issues. Trust me, manufacturers need to know that customer satisfaction and loyalty do not go so far as to make flaws or errors off limits to discussion. At the end of the day, if you expect less, you'll get less.

 

[PhilDrinkwater]

I don't see anything harsh or out of line about the OP's view on this. This isn't about being a "good guy" or demonstrating that you can grin and bear the small stuff. And it's not about expecting a perfect product, either. It's about the expectation that for your money, which here, is plenty, you'll receive what we call a "merchantable" product.

The light leak seems to admittedly be a flaw, correctable or not. With all bigger money DSLR's, the manufacturer of the product needs to know that flaws that are incompatible with the basic object of the product aren't going to be considered small stuff. Likewise, loyalists and people that pride themselves in "not sweating the small stuff" can be mum if they choose to, but they shouldn't be squelching polite commentary about such issues. Trust me, manufacturers need to know that customer satisfaction and loyalty do not go so far as to make flaws or errors off limits to discussion. At the end of the day, if you expect less, you'll get less.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on both sides.

However to me, this is what I object to:

"Either way, I’m returning mine, and will consider buying it again after Canon has satisfactorily addressed the matter. Shipping a brand-new camera back to Canon to have it modified or repaired is completely unacceptable, and utterly out of the question."

I just think its totally fair to offer a fix and unnecessary to object to it.

 

[awinphoto]

While I will say it IS an issue, it's an old issue... maybe it happens with nikons camera, maybe it doesn't. It happened with the 5d2 and other cameras no huge outcry occurred. It could be with the price increase, with the large anticipation for this camera, with the demand for this camera, everyone expected it to do everything but cook omelets for them. In real world situations, it could become an issue, but then again i'm afraid you have a better chance of being hit by lightning that it affecting you in a shoot. Not trying to be dismissive, i'm just not worried. Frankly, having the 9 pt AF in the 5d2 was a far greater "defect" than this LCD leak in the 5d3.

 

[Astro]

The problem is users who take photos with their lens hoods on...

Really ?

https://vimeo.com/40135673

sice when do you shot with a DSLR... 3 days? ;D

 

[MrSandman]

I realize I’m stirring up a hornet’s nest by saying this, but here goes:

Why don’t we hear about this with the D800, D4, or D700? How is it that Nikon managed to make their upper LCD displays not leak light into their cameras? Do they have access to better light blocking materials than Canon? Of course not.

(Again, I’m not saying I think Nikon makes better cameras - they don’t - but this is clearly an aspect where Canon dropped the ball. I’m glad to see they intend to fix this defect. But as a consumer dropping $3500 on a camera body, I want to buy one that comes from the factory without the defect!).

Clearly Canon didn't drop the ball. It's a tiny issue. Nikon have their own issues, for example http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1100467

The D4 glitch you cited by the URL is an isolated issue experienced by one individual. That is hardly comparable to a design flaw that affects every unit of said model. You need to understand the difference between a glitch/failure and a design flaw. Not adequately sealing a meter from ambient light is a design flaw.

 

[altenae]

Mrsandman,

It's really easy.
Don't like it don't buy it.

 

[MrSandman]

I don't see anything harsh or out of line about the OP's view on this. This isn't about being a "good guy" or demonstrating that you can grin and bear the small stuff. And it's not about expecting a perfect product, either. It's about the expectation that for your money, which here, is plenty, you'll receive what we call a "merchantable" product.

The light leak seems to admittedly be a flaw, correctable or not. With all bigger money DSLR's, the manufacturer of the product needs to know that flaws that are incompatible with the basic object of the product aren't going to be considered small stuff. Likewise, loyalists and people that pride themselves in "not sweating the small stuff" can be mum if they choose to, but they shouldn't be squelching polite commentary about such issues. Trust me, manufacturers need to know that customer satisfaction and loyalty do not go so far as to make flaws or errors off limits to discussion. At the end of the day, if you expect less, you'll get less.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on both sides.

However to me, this is what I object to:

"Either way, I’m returning mine, and will consider buying it again after Canon has satisfactorily addressed the matter. Shipping a brand-new camera back to Canon to have it modified or repaired is completely unacceptable, and utterly out of the question."

I just think its totally fair to offer a fix and unnecessary to object to it.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that when something gets shipped to you as a defective product right from the get-go, it should be replaced, not repaired. You are contending that I should be content to send my brand-new camera back to Canon to let them open it up and work on it. Again, for a brand-new camera. No way.

 

[Dylan777]

The problem is users who take photos with their lens hoods on...

Really ?

https://vimeo.com/40135673

Hey rushmore77,
She has 20/20 vision - Do you think she will see light if I remove the EYE MASK/blind?

 

[thepancakeman]

I don't see anything harsh or out of line about the OP's view on this. This isn't about being a "good guy" or demonstrating that you can grin and bear the small stuff. And it's not about expecting a perfect product, either. It's about the expectation that for your money, which here, is plenty, you'll receive what we call a "merchantable" product.

The light leak seems to admittedly be a flaw, correctable or not. With all bigger money DSLR's, the manufacturer of the product needs to know that flaws that are incompatible with the basic object of the product aren't going to be considered small stuff. Likewise, loyalists and people that pride themselves in "not sweating the small stuff" can be mum if they choose to, but they shouldn't be squelching polite commentary about such issues. Trust me, manufacturers need to know that customer satisfaction and loyalty do not go so far as to make flaws or errors off limits to discussion. At the end of the day, if you expect less, you'll get less.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on both sides.

However to me, this is what I object to:

"Either way, I’m returning mine, and will consider buying it again after Canon has satisfactorily addressed the matter. Shipping a brand-new camera back to Canon to have it modified or repaired is completely unacceptable, and utterly out of the question."

I just think its totally fair to offer a fix and unnecessary to object to it.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that when something gets shipped to you as a defective product right from the get-go, it should be replaced, not repaired. You are contending that I should be content to send my brand-new camera back to Canon to let them open it up and work on it. Again, for a brand-new camera. No way.

Yeah, they should be reliable like $35,000 cars that...oh wait, those get recalls too.

 

[TrumpetPower!]

What many has it been confirmed by? So far I have seen one person say that he found a difference with the lens cap off and it ONLY occured at EV1, the absolute bottom limit of the metering performance range, where it underexposed by 1/3 of a stop.

That sounds like me you're referring to, and you're making the situation sound significantly worse than what I discovered.

Set the camera in manual mode to EV 1 (1" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100), and find a dark corner of a dark room to point to until the meter bug is centered. Turning the LCD backlight on and off will not budge the meter at all. This is the bottom of the specified range of the 5DIII meter.

Set it to EV 0 and the backlight still won't change the exposure.

At EV -1, the backlight moves to the right by 1/3 stop when you turn it on...but you can't say that it's causing underexposure at that point because it's operating outside of its design parameters and may well already be off by some unknown and unspecified amount in either direction.

At EV -2, the backlight still only makes the meter move 1/3 stop to the right.

At EV -3, the backlight makes the meter bounce between 1/3 and 2/3 stops.

At EV -4, the backlight makes the meter move solidly on 2/3 stops to the right...and you're five stops below the bottom of the meter's range (30" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100) and basically in the dark. There's no way the meter's readings are reliable, with or without the backlight on. Any photographic meter -- not just the one built in to the camera.

If you're actually photographing in conditions even as dark as EV 1...well, either you're doing long-exposure tripod work, maybe of the nighttime skyline, and you know full well that your meter is already useless...or you're being silly showing off your new toy outside at night away from the lights, and probably shooting at ISO 25,600 or something ludicrous and you know the results, though surprisingly not bad, will be totally useless for anything serious. And at EV -2 when the "problem" actually starts to appear, and only at a third of a stop? We're talking moonlit landscape photography, where no sane person even thinks to have a look at the meter. Hell, you're probably thinking of shooting in bulb mode with a stopwatch in those conditions....

Cheers,

b&

 

[jfretless]

The Mayans were right! ...the end of world is coming!

in other words... meh.

I had been mulling over the choice between the D800 and the 5D3, and went with the 5D3 for a number of reasons - one of which being the fact that I like the Canon ‘design’ altogether more than Nikon’s. And then this light leak issue creeps up (which I confirmed just now on my 5D3). I’ve been hearing people saying things liked “it doesn’t matter in real-world shooting”, or “it’s easy to avoid it by just not lighting the LCD in dark environments. 1. This just isn’t true - if light is leaking in and altering the metering, you get (slightly) altered photos. This has been confirmed by many. And 2. whether most of us shoot in really dark environments or not simply doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t have to take precautionary measures when shooting photos to work around a design flaw. We as customers should not be the solution to a product’s design problem. And no matter how easy the solution is, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a design flaw.

I remember watching The Tonight Show many years ago and during one of Jay Leno’s monologues, he said, “In other news, the FDA came out with new rules regarding fecal matter in poultry. Now folks.......this is the new rule? Shouldn’t this have been the old rule? Shouldn’t this have been rule #1??”

(....Of course, he went on to say “I sure hope this doesn’t mean Colonel Sanders is now down to only ten secret herbs and spices in his fried chicken”....but that’s beside the point.)

Similarly, a camera properly blocking out light should be rule #1. A camera is supposed to block out light....just in case we decide to shoot in extremely low light environments (which many already do). And for a fairly-dim LCD backlight to alter the metering in a dark environment is just plain scandalous. That kind of thing suggests that Canon pushed this camera out before testing it thoroughly (or maybe they knew about it and decided to ship it out anyway and hope for the best).

Either way, I’m returning mine, and will consider buying it again after Canon has satisfactorily addressed the matter. Shipping a brand-new camera back to Canon to have it modified or repaired is completely unacceptable, and utterly out of the question.

 

[MrSandman]

It's the very fact that it's not a $35,000 car that makes the camera more of a disposable/replaceable item. However, for a camera it is expensive, and as such should be able to perform basic tasks like isolating the meter from ambient light.

 

[zim]

What many has it been confirmed by? So far I have seen one person say that he found a difference with the lens cap off and it ONLY occured at EV1, the absolute bottom limit of the metering performance range, where it underexposed by 1/3 of a stop.

That sounds like me you're referring to, and you're making the situation sound significantly worse than what I discovered.

Set the camera in manual mode to EV 1 (1" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100), and find a dark corner of a dark room to point to until the meter bug is centered. Turning the LCD backlight on and off will not budge the meter at all. This is the bottom of the specified range of the 5DIII meter.

Set it to EV 0 and the backlight still won't change the exposure.

At EV -1, the backlight moves to the right by 1/3 stop when you turn it on...but you can't say that it's causing underexposure at that point because it's operating outside of its design parameters and may well already be off by some unknown and unspecified amount in either direction.

At EV -2, the backlight still only makes the meter move 1/3 stop to the right.

At EV -3, the backlight makes the meter bounce between 1/3 and 2/3 stops.

At EV -4, the backlight makes the meter move solidly on 2/3 stops to the right...and you're five stops below the bottom of the meter's range (30" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100) and basically in the dark. There's no way the meter's readings are reliable, with or without the backlight on. Any photographic meter -- not just the one built in to the camera.

If you're actually photographing in conditions even as dark as EV 1...well, either you're doing long-exposure tripod work, maybe of the nighttime skyline, and you know full well that your meter is already useless...or you're being silly showing off your new toy outside at night away from the lights, and probably shooting at ISO 25,600 or something ludicrous and you know the results, though surprisingly not bad, will be totally useless for anything serious. And at EV -2 when the "problem" actually starts to appear, and only at a third of a stop? We're talking moonlit landscape photography, where no sane person even thinks to have a look at the meter. Hell, you're probably thinking of shooting in bulb mode with a stopwatch in those conditions....

Cheers,

b&

Don't suppose anyone has a D800 they could try this with, just for a laugh hehehe

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

What many has it been confirmed by? So far I have seen one person say that he found a difference with the lens cap off and it ONLY occured at EV1, the absolute bottom limit of the metering performance range, where it underexposed by 1/3 of a stop.

That sounds like me you're referring to, and you're making the situation sound significantly worse than what I discovered.

Set the camera in manual mode to EV 1 (1" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100), and find a dark corner of a dark room to point to until the meter bug is centered. Turning the LCD backlight on and off will not budge the meter at all. This is the bottom of the specified range of the 5DIII meter.

Set it to EV 0 and the backlight still won't change the exposure.

At EV -1, the backlight moves to the right by 1/3 stop when you turn it on...but you can't say that it's causing underexposure at that point because it's operating outside of its design parameters and may well already be off by some unknown and unspecified amount in either direction.

At EV -2, the backlight still only makes the meter move 1/3 stop to the right.

At EV -3, the backlight makes the meter bounce between 1/3 and 2/3 stops.

At EV -4, the backlight makes the meter move solidly on 2/3 stops to the right...and you're five stops below the bottom of the meter's range (30" @ f/1.4 @ ISO 100) and basically in the dark. There's no way the meter's readings are reliable, with or without the backlight on. Any photographic meter -- not just the one built in to the camera.

If you're actually photographing in conditions even as dark as EV 1...well, either you're doing long-exposure tripod work, maybe of the nighttime skyline, and you know full well that your meter is already useless...or you're being silly showing off your new toy outside at night away from the lights, and probably shooting at ISO 25,600 or something ludicrous and you know the results, though surprisingly not bad, will be totally useless for anything serious. And at EV -2 when the "problem" actually starts to appear, and only at a third of a stop? We're talking moonlit landscape photography, where no sane person even thinks to have a look at the meter. Hell, you're probably thinking of shooting in bulb mode with a stopwatch in those conditions....

Cheers,

b&

I think it was someone else since they mentioned EV1 not EV -1:

"Since the operating range of the 5D3's light meter is Ev 1 to 20 according the manual, I decided to try testing for the light leak phenomenon at a light level equivalent to Ev 1--the minimum light light level at which the 5D3's light meter can be relied upon to provide an accurate reading. Although I'm not an expert on Ev levels, after consulting a chart on Wikipedia, I determined that at f/5.6 and ISO 100, Ev 1 would correspond to a shutter speed of 15 seconds. (If I'm wrong about this, I'm sure someone will tell me.) So I set my 5D3 to ISO 100, and my lens to f/5.6, took off the lens cap, covered the viewfinder eyepiece, and found a dark environment where the 5D3's meter gave me a shutter speed of 15 seconds. Then I pressed the LCD illumination button to see what, if anything, would happen.

Having previously convinced myself that the leak leak phenomenon was only likely to manifest itself at Ev levels far below Ev 1, I fully expected to see no change in the shutter speed. But to my surprise, I did see a change, although only a slight one--from 15 seconds to 13 seconds. Shining a flash light directly into the top LCD resulted in a similar change.

I then repeated the test by moving to a very slightly brighter area where the meter gave me a reading of 5 seconds--corresponding to something just over Ev 2. When I pressed the LCD illumination button this time, I saw no change, nor did I see any change with the flashlight.

So, what conclusions do I draw from this. Well, contrary to my earlier assumption, it does appear that this phenomenon could affect metering within the 5D3's published metering range--but only at the very bottom of the range--around Ev 1--and only very slightly--the difference between 15 seconds and 13 seconds. If you're trying to meter at lower light levels, say around Ev -4 where most of the testing I've seen posted has been occurring, the effect on the meter reading will likely be more significant, but of course, any metering you might try to do at Ev -4, or any other level below Ev 1, is already inherently unreliable."

In either case though it doesn't seem like a problem to me and certainly nothing to be embarrassed about, come on.

 

[Raddy]

I really would like to know how many people would have noticed this flaw on their own, not reading about it on the web. So the Internet ruined it all! ;D

People started to end up in all this tech talk, examining this and that but kinda forgot what (in this case) the 5D3 is actually made for. Lemme guess... Taking pictures?!
Oh and then I always hear: "Hey, its 3500 bucks. I expect it to be perfect." But wait, actually they were looking for 35+MP and some other features still missing. But still people were buying like crazy and some of them seem to be doomed in finding some issue which would justify complaining about the price afterwards.

No offense, but this is getting worse with every new model released.
But I'm always glad to see people still being happy with their purchase and I do got the feeling those are the guys who actually really use and value this camera.

 

[prestonpalmer]

Talk about a newby photographer posting his amazing discovery on vimeo, and then those who think its a new discovery and are shocked.

Exactly.

 

[prestonpalmer]

If you want to complain maybe complain that canon sticks with the annoying little neck strap thing on all non 1 series bodies.

But this is nothing new.
They would have to recall every SLR/DSLR made in the last, well, who knows how many years.

That's exactly correct.

 

[zim]

I really would like to know how many people would have noticed this flaw on their own, not reading about it on the web. So the Internet ruined it all! ;D

Hey I like the interweb you get a good laugh, oh yeh and there's always porn 8)

 

[prestonpalmer]

Why don’t we hear about this with the D800, D4, or D700?

Why don't we hear about this with the Canon 40D and 5D mark II ???
My 40D / 5D MK II show the same issue.

Maybe because we didn't test the old DSLR's with the lenscap attached

Same here. My 40D and BOTH my 5D2's do the EXACT SAME THING. Oh wait. Maybe I should take photos with my lens cap off... crap.