Sony A7R V: “Unable to Magnify” Image — does Sony fix any bugs?
Related: botched design, build quality, imcompetence crisis, John G, please fix this, please fix this camera, please fix this Sony, Sony, Sony A7R, Sony A7R II, Sony A7R III, Sony A7R IV, Sony A7R V, Sony mirrorless
I sold my rock-solid Sony A1 to raise funds for the A7R V, so I do not have the A1 as a backup.
UPDATE Jan 19 2024: Sony marketing acknowledged the bug today (as in made aware of the complaint). Maybe they’ll get that through to engineering and we will see a fix sometime.
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Reposting this here in 2024.
Does Sony fix any important bugs any more? This is not the only issue.
I first reported this issue way back in December 2022, and updated it in March 2023.
Sony has had three thirteen months to fix it. But it is not fixed, and it is a serious impediment to my work. I am not the only one to see this issue.
- I thought it related to the last frame of a focus bracketing series, but it happens with still frames also.
- Happens with both lossless compressed and regular compressed images.
- Happens with both the Sony FE 12-24mm f/2.8 GM and Sony FE 20-70mm f/4 (which does not rule out other lenses).
Semi-randomly and as shown, the Sony A7R V fails with an error.
And once this occurs, the image is forever corrupted and can never be magnified in the camera. You can pull the battery,power the camera on/off—makes no difference.
Otherwise (on the computer), the taken image can be processed normally.
This is a serious impediment to my work when I am trying to evaluate focus, depth of field, etc. It’s a disaster because I have no way to verify that the shot I captured is acceptable or not.
As of 2023-03-19 2024-01-01, there no firmware update for the Sony A7R V. Which is pretty sad, because there are plenty of other issues Sony could address besides bugs like this.
Cause = RAW+JPEG?
I generally shoot RAW+JPEG (max quality) because then when I magnify I get a notably higher quality magnified image, which is very helpful when checking things.
But I tried an experiment: on the computer, I moved all the JPG files into a subfolder so that the camera could not see them. I the reinserted the card back into the camera and... no problems. So it appears that it is a bug that that relates to shooting RAW+JPEG.
George P writes:
I only shoot .jpg on my Sony A7R V and from time to time I have the same error.
It happened on safari using the Sony 100-400.
Cannot specify the exact circumstances but I shoot only .jpg with parallel storage on two Sony CF Express A with 80 gb each.
The high pitched noise does not happen to me (followed your specifications)
Camera was bought in early January 2023 here in Canada (sold my Fuji GFX100S because I love the Sony AF and needed a longer lens)
DIGLLOYD: I agree it appears to be JPEG related, and clearly a bug.
John G writes:
Thanks for raising this issue. I had the same thing occur shooting jpeg only, writing to a single latest generation Sony v90 tough SD 128gb.
DIGLLOYD: that seems to isolate the issue to the JPEG itself.
