Dimage 7Hi hangs

[photofreak]

Does anybody have experiences with a hanging system on a Minolta Dimage 7Hi?

Sometimes (about every 150-300 pictures) the camera hangs while focusing or immediatly after pressing the release button.

Then the monitors are on and all signals are on.
Switching off the camera brings no change.

The only solution I found is to switch off the camera and open the battery lock. After closing the lock and setting the camera to "on" the camera restarts working normal.
But I am afraid to do that. The taken picture always is lost, of course.

In only one case the standard display showed "ERR".

Are there any hints to my new camera?

I am still hoping that there is no Microsoft system installed in the camera ;-)

Thank you in advance.
photofreak

[sjms]

never had it happen on mine. sounds like a possible issue.

[websounding]

strange, but just the other day i had very low batteries, and when i took them out and put them in again for the heck of it it worked well for a little. maybe you should check the quality of them? the only time i had any kind of error in about a year of shooting, was once lately when i copied some tiffs or something not native to the camera, from my mac to the camera to take home with me from work. it didn't seem to want to read the disk/card then until i downloaded tiffs off the card and reformatted. are you using the original 16 MB card that came with it? maybe try a new and bigger one?

'sound

[websounding]

at the bottom of this page i just happened across it sounds like same thing you're having:

http://www.kxcr.org/minolta_7hi.html

'sound

[photofreak]

Originally Posted by websounding

at the bottom of this page i just happened across it sounds like same thing you're having:

http://www.kxcr.org/minolta_7hi.html

'sound

Yes, the same situation is described there. But I have this frozen system more often. And I am happy that there were no damaged or lost files.

The card I use is a Microdrive 1GB.
Because of a very slowly transfer via USB I decided to put the Microdrive out of the camera an then in my notebook card reader.
About 350 pics would be copied within 15 Minutes then.
Maybe the error is to move instead of copiing the files??

I try to format the Microdrive first and try some more shooting days to reach the next 1000 pics.

[newbieX]

I have experienced this too...happened to me 2 or 3 times and I did exactly what you did (removed the batteries). Hate to do that since you're cutting power to the circuitry when it's sitting there and processing something. But, this was after taking over 2000-3000 pictures. I didn't notice the first time, but the second time it happened I noticed that I had been taking pictures when the batteries were on low (red battery signal was on) for a while and I was still taking pictures. Since then I have been replacing batteries the minute I see the red battery low signal. Hasn't happened to me yet since then but I haven't taken that many pictures either.

[cald]

My d7i blanks the top and back screen and makes odd noises for about 5 seconds then restores the displays normally. This blanking happens when the focus/shoot button is pressed 1/2 way. Only thing I can think of is sometime back I accidently removed the Microdrive without turning the camera off. (Wasn't recording or playing either.) I reloaded firmware V1.10u via a reformatted CF card but it didn't seem to help. What did help a bit was switching the power save to 10 minutes. It worked well a whole evening. Next morning the 'bug' was back. Changing power save time seems to help but so far not permanently. (Hope I don't have to send it to Minolta?)

[zhu001]

happened to me more than 10 times (out of 5000 photos)

my guess is the cf card and cf driver. after a while, the card driver becames pretty hot. the heat could cause the malfunction too.

but i dont think take out the batteries will cause any harm. in fact, periodically reset the system might good to a camera if there is any malfunction.

[cald]

Zhu001,
It didn't matter if my CF16 or big Microdrive was loaded. (Knock on wood) seems to behave better today? (I hope!)