I’ve spent the last week playing with the mirrorless camera, the Sony NEX-3. But at this time I’m unhappy to report that what I have on my hands is basically a brick. Sony was applauded with the camera first came out for it’s excitingly outside the box (literally) design, and great feature set, but attacked for it’s menu driven design, and less than intuitive controls. My experience with the camera was that the controls were only slightly annoying, and mostly easy to figure out. I had an easier time with it than say, the Olympus Pen, which still requires some menu hunting for me. Anyway, a recent firmware update from Sony was said to have corrected some of the gripes. Most of the internet praise has indeed been good. It’s not as popular as the micro 4/3rds cameras, but people who have them really like them. My week with the camera was great. Image quality at low ISO was pretty killer, and high ISO night scenes looked gritty but colorful, as opposed to noisy and corrupted, which is what we’ve seen from digital cameras just a few years ago.
However my fun turned to frustration after I ran the Sony updating software. I got through the initial checklist and came to the ‘run’ stage of the update procedure. Well this is when things got hairy. It caused what I now know of as a Kernel Panic. A particularly hard to trigger crash in OSX that absolutely requires a restart. Now upon restart the firmware update was severed, so when all was said and done I am left with a brain dead camera. The only function that remains is a small red light that illuminates itself in the battery compartment. I’m assuming this is the Oh Shit! light, because that’s how I felt.
After contacting Sony I went through three tiers of technical support levels. The first seemed to know that Sony may make electronic products, the second seemed to know what I digital camera is and how to connect it to the computer, but had no idea what Sony’s own firmware updating software looks like, or how it functioned. The third basically told me after a very short conversation that this camera needs to be serviced.
It’s unfortunate because now I have to explain to my manager that this camera doesn’t work any more, and it isn’t really my fault. I know how I’d react were the positions reversed.
Sigh. Shit happens.
Here are some of the images from the camera while it worked though.
