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Nikon releases bug fix firmware update for the 10 year-old D7100 DSLR camera
- hef19898 4y agoSeeing this on the HN front page the day Nikon told me they did the necessary service and "repairs" on my 10+ year old D700 is purely coincidence I'm sure.
- omnibrain 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- snak 4y agoApparently also known as the "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon".
- jeanlucas 4y agoEveryone is an NPC, you are the only person on the internet.
- hef19898 4y agoThanks for confirming all my doubts! My cat is real so. I think...
- function_seven 4y ago> My cat is real so I think This reads like something Descartes would write, if he were influenced by Dali. (Yes I removed the period to make it work better. Necessary to reach 3 Cuil)
- multjoy 4y agoIt's a reference to HHGTG (the radio show, specifically) when they found the true ruler of the universe.
- balentio 4y agoThe main playable characters all have Nikon cameras.
- paulmd 4y agoMake it to the HN frontpage often? Oh, what am I saying? Of course you don't.
- Forgeties79 4y agoHonestly? Yeah. HN is (I’m pretty sure) the only site I visit where uBlock and brave both detect nothing to block/restrict.
- perardi 4y agoI had a D700. What a camera. Not surprised you had it serviced—if it’s a reasonably cheap repair job, that is still a great body if you don’t care about resolution. (And people put way too much emphasis on resolution.) I swear that thing ran on fusion or zero-point energy. It could be nostalgia or just me being old, but I am sure it got vastly better battery life than my current mirrorless camera.
- turminal 4y ago> but I am sure it got vastly better battery life than my current mirrorless camera. That sounds about right. Mirrorless cameras need to do a lot of image processing and that affects battery life significantly.
- jjav 4y ago> It could be nostalgia or just me being old, but I am sure it got vastly better battery life than my current mirrorless camera. Not nostalgia, DSLRs get vastly better battery life than mirrorless cameras. Because there is nothing using electricity in the optical path, you're just looking through the lens. A mirrorless on the other hand is constantly using power for the screen.
- hef19898 4y agoIt's my dad's back-up body, I switched his D200 back im exchange and got a D300 with, IIRC a shuttet count of 30k-ish, as a back-up. Service was 90 bucks, sensor and mirror cleaning, firmware update, general service, AF and exposure config, laser callibration of the mirrors and prisms. Rather decent IMHO, I have yet to get it back, looking forward to it! Battery life if great, during a full week in Iceland I charged the two batteries once, and propably wouod have made without charging. Resultion is, at least for me, only proplem when it comes to cropping. Not cropping in changing the format or to cut of the corners (the D700 viewer covers only 95% of the picture which can lead to some stuff at the borders of teh image you don't want there) but rather croppong out stuff like bird to enlarge them. Then, and only then, the 12 MP are an issue. Otherwise a lower resolution forces you sinpmy take better pictures in the first place. And for online use 12 MP are plenty anyway, I don't plan to print a house wall with my photos. And lower resolution means smaller files, which a benefit in itself. I love that camera, if simply because it gave me back the joy of photography.
- uncletammy 4y agoSmells like class action damage control to me
- jug 4y agoMaybe I'm a cynic here but such a specific, single bug fix makes it look like it's for PR reasons and headlines like this.
- punnerud 4y agoAnd shouldn’t they have fixed this 9 3/4 years ago?
- p1mrx 4y agoA wizard is never late, Harry.
- Jiejeing 4y agoOr the most probable thing is that someone internally was annoyed by the bug and got permission to release. A single update to a 10 years old camera on an apparently abandoned product line is not something that gets a big amount of PR coverage, especially since nikon DLSRs had very few updates ever. Unless it is part of an up-and-coming new updating scheme (which I very much doubt), it will not make much difference except a little goodwill from D7100 owners.
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoPR reasons on a DSLR camera now?! I don’t think so.
- onion2k 4y agoThis makes Nikon look like a company that supports all its products in the long term. That's some seriously good PR.
- formerly_proven 4y agoThey do just that, though.
- giuliomagnifico 4y ago
- gzalo 4y agoMy guess is that an employee wanted to use it as a webcam via hdmi and was annoyed by the time limitation, so they fixed it themselves :P
- shultays 4y agoOne employee wouldn't have that much freedom to release patches like this. Or maybe he is an old guard that was annoyed by the time limitation and no one was able to say no to him
- vanderZwan 4y agoDon't forget it's a Japanese company. Which, as I understand, has a culture where people can't get fired, only promoted to positions where they do nothing and are out of people's way. Maybe it was one of those people.
- gfaster 4y agoJapanese companies are also stereotypically drowning in bureaucracy and have strict adherence to hierarchy. Maybe it was a manager that got annoyed and had an underling do it?
- manceraio 4y agoThat sounds about right. But how come a manager having a 10 year old camera and not a newest model?
- washadjeffmad 4y agoRolling stones gather no moss.
- dylan604 4y agoSometimes, you just love a device and don't want to use something new. I still shoot a 5DmkII, and there's really only one feature that is available in the newer models that I'd love to have on my older body (specifically number of focus points). I've used all of the models after that including mirrorless, but this older body still my fave. So the 10 year old camera isn't that strange to me.
- isaacfrond 4y agoWell, whatever the reason, be it personal irritation, or PR purpopose, one hurray for Nikon and against consumerism.
- imwillofficial 4y agoThis is the type of product and customer commitment we need more of.
- pcurve 4y agoyou might like this video (has English subtitle) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa20iG8yplM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa20iG8yplM A pencil sharpener maker provides free (most of the time) warranty service to their products, including ones purchased over 40 years ago. Apparently many Koreans have sentimental values attached to these devices and can't bare to throw them away.
- ece 4y agoThe PS3 got an update in may.
- lizardactivist 4y agoReally? What was the update? It also reminds me of how I have not used any newer video game console than the PS2. I'm so behind the times!
- ece 4y agoThey've added some keys to keep BR discs playing in recent updates, and apparently you can't create a PSN account from a PS3 anymore. There were "quality" and "performance" fixes until 2020. It's my last console, the first was a SNES followed by a PSP. I used OtherOS but then upgraded anyway when it was gone. The Youtube/Netflix apps still work fine. I'm going try CFW one of these days on my early slim, just to know the temperature. https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Thermal https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Thermal
- babypuncher 4y agoI am surprised AACS still bothers issuing new batches of keys. Blu-Ray copy protection has been pretty thoroughly broken for over a decade now. The fact that most people no longer have optical drives on their computers is a bigger barrier to casual movie piracy than AACS.
- lizardactivist 4y agoIt has always been difficult to beat the Japanese when it comes to quality and service, and I am frequently reminded of just how seriously they take it.
- samwestdev 4y agoI live in Japan and have to deal with Japanese customers on a daily base. As they say here: "The customer is God". Even one unsatisfied customer is going to destroy your reputation so companies are real careful here.
- rossmohax 4y agoHow does it work? What superpowers customers have in Japan, which they don't have anywhere else? Few years ago Sony had global week long outage, no one could play multiplayer, yet it is still a successful company.
- Sardtok 4y agoIt's more a cultural idea that you should treat/consider the customer very highly. It comes from the honour system of inner and outer circles. So conceptually the customer (honoured guest, okyakusama) outranks you.
- lizardactivist 4y agoYou can't compare the Japanese as a people to, say, the typical American, who as a customer thinks the whole world is owed to him. The Japanese are far less demanding, and understanding and forgiving of accidents like these.
- babypuncher 4y agoSo basically the signal-to-noise ratio in Japan is much greater than we are used to stateside, leading to actual problems being more visible and customer service departments taking them more seriously.
- deleted 4y ago
- Tepix 4y agoHey perhaps Panasonic will finally get their webcam software for their high end cameras fixed and take it out of beta (where it has been since the pandemic). In my dreams, they would also create a version for Apple silicon...
- jonahhorowitz 4y agoJust use a $12-$15 HDMI->USB capture card off eBay/Amazon. They work incredibly well and you don't have to deal with buggy software. I've been using my GH3 as a webcam since the beginning of the pandemic. I bought this one, but there are a lot of sellers for that exact product: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184350601059 https://www.ebay.com/itm/184350601059
- pvaldes 4y agoOnly for windows or Mac, it seems.
- AndrianV 4y agoNever is too late. But, if they update = someone use this camera.
- jonah 4y agoI actually just bought a D7100 on Craigslist for a few hundred dollars as an upgrade from my D7000. I've taken several thousand shots on it since and really like it. It's great for what it is - higher end APS-C camera. Aside from no 4K video etc it feels like a thoroughly modern camera. The AF is good, the 24 megapixel sensor produces good raw files, the continuous shooting rate is pretty fast (though the buffer is small and can't shoot very frames in one blast), the design of the camera and layout and controls are very similar to the latest Nikon DSLRs.
- hef19898 4y agoI recently got a D300 for under 200 bucks in close to mint condition to go with tha D700 and replace the D70 with a scratched sensor. Great camera for my purpose, and the price left some budget for lenses.
- jjav 4y ago> Never is too late. But, if they update = someone use this camera. Cameras don't age like software or phones, this is why I like them. A 10 year old DSLR like the Nikon D7100 (I have one) is still a very modern camera and it'll be good for a few decades to come. (Sadly this is why good companies like Nikon struggle financially, since there is no forceful upgrade treadmill unlike for phone companies. But as a consumer I absolutely love being able to buy something solid that'll work for decades.)
- JohnBooty 4y agoYeah! If you don't need the video features of newer cameras, the main advantage of newer DSLRs is improved low light performance. You don't need the extra megapixels unless you have specific needs, such as perhaps astrophotography. An "ancient" ~7.2MP sensor gives you 3000x2400 pixels. Plenty for full page prints at 300DPI.
- Bedon292 4y agoI am normally pretty good about updating firmware on stuff, but never even thought about camera firmware until this post. Sure enough my 8 year old Nikon has some updates. Including one from 2020, 6 years after it came out. Not the 10 years of this one but still impressive.
- failTide 4y agoYou can also install various hacked firmware if you're ever inclined. The mods are pretty interesting, including improved modes for astrophotography.
- dylan604 4y agoThe best mod is ripping out that IR filter. Sadly, that's not going to happen via software. That's the firmest of firmware mods.
- JohnBooty 4y agoThat was some kind of privacy thing, right? So you can't take voyeuristic revealing photos that see thru peoples' clothes to an extent?
- dylan604 4y agoNope. Not at all. Not sure where you got that info, but I would question that source. It's because the CMOS sensors are much more sensitive to IR than our eyes, so they expose in that frequency range which causes the images to not develop the way we expect them. For astrophotography, lots of very interesting data comes from the IR bands, so removing the filter gets a lot more details.
- JohnBooty 4y agoThought I was going crazy for a second. I was half-remembering this debacle: https://bettermarketing.pub/sonys-see-through-camera-disaster-cost-them-100-million-f277609b26a https://bettermarketing.pub/sonys-see-through-camera-disaste... It seems to me that this would be possible to achieve with any camera that captured near-IR wavelengths, with the appropriate filters or firmware hacks. In addition to what you posted, might this also be on camera makers' minds?
- phcreery 4y agoI have a Nikon D7100 and was just thinking about updating the firmware yesterday since there probably won't be anymore patches. I am pleasantly surprised by this.
- techwiz137 4y agoExcept same thing on D3400.
- sdfjkl 4y agoWish someone would fix some of the more severe bugs in the Nikon 1 AW1, which they abandoned soon after release :-/ There was a single firmware update, and among other stuff, the GPS location still confuses East and West afterwards.
- mosselman 4y agoThis is great. I have a D5000 lying around, I've given up on DSLR photography on holiday since my iPhone is smaller and better at video and photography in dark places and about 10000x smaller and lighter, but I just couldn't sell my Nikon. Happy to see the company being dedicated to its customers after such a long time.
- radicality 4y agoI have a Fuji camera, and there’s a new firmware update available which ‘fixes’ a potential dataloss condition by setting the max number of objects to be stored per a DCF folder to be 999 from 9999.I haven’t yet updated since my workflow has a bunch of scripts which expected filenames per folder to be 4 digits. I should update my scripts, but my immediate observation though were that this seems like a bandaid solution? And not sure if it even follows the spec, afaik it allows for up to 9999 _files_ per directory but some DCF objects can take up multiple files (eg a THM thumbnail and the JPEG). The details on the bug are sparse too, how is MacOS not seeing data written to an SDXC card, is it corrupting it? Is it a filesystem limitation for 9999 files, or an actual Mac OS bug? firmware - https://fujifilm-x.com/global/global-news/2022/0202_4199100/ https://fujifilm-x.com/global/global-news/2022/0202_4199100/ spec for how things are named - https://www.jeita.or.jp/japanese/standard/book/CP-3461B_E/#target/page_no=42 https://www.jeita.or.jp/japanese/standard/book/CP-3461B_E/#t...
- iggldiggl 4y ago> Is it a filesystem limitation for 9999 files, or an actual Mac OS bug? Wikipedia claims that exFAT supports 2,796,202 files per directory. So to me that reads like some sort of filesystem driver bug. Either the camera isn't following the exFAT spec correctly and by chance both Windows and Linux happen to tolerate that behaviour and macOS doesn't, or conversely there's some sort of bug in the macOS exFAT implementation. You'd hope that in that situation Fuji would have double-checked its exFAT implementation, so maybe it is indeed a macOS bug?
- n0th3r-curious 4y agoInteresting to see many technical comments... I have one, and will update the firmware. Pardon my dumb comment - guessing whether they implemented some kind of upgrade where it has option to connect to wifi...
- codys 4y agoCamera software is an area that is frustratingly closed off, and where manufacturers regularly differentiate new/more expensive cameras with firmware differences: subject detection, auto focus, drive modes (pre-capture, higher frame rates, etc), file format support (HEIC, compressed raw, colorspaces), ui features (how custom modes work, menu systems, etc). Competition in this space driven by a provider that doesn't have a motive to convince users to buy the next new camera (ie: open source software) would be very useful to users. Sony and Panasonic cameras (and perhaps other manufacturers) are running Linux (and release some of the third party source code they include in their products, but the amount of reverse engineering that has been done on those camera's software. Canon uses a custom RTOS (DryOS), and lots of work has been done to extend the existing Canon firmware to enhance its capabilities (Magic Lantern[1] and CHDK[2]), but as far as I know fully open software for these devices doesn't exist. Camera capabilities these days are highly software dependent, and the functionality of dedicated cameras is held back by subpar software development practices and a lack of pressure to make things better. 1: https://magiclantern.fm/ https://magiclantern.fm/ 2: https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK
- dylan604 4y agoIt's not just that they want you to buy new cameras (of course they do), but they also do it to protect different verticals within their company. If a stills camera can shoot video of the same quality but much lower price, then that takes sales from the provideo cameras.
- codys 4y agoThat's a great point, and shows up in annoying ways in Sony's camera line up in whether "high frame rate" support exists. For Sony cameras, HFR implies "can capture a limited length (seconds, typically) of footage at a higher frame rate (240fps, 480fps, 960fps, etc) and reduced resolution as frame rate increases (this is not the same as normal video modes and S&Q video modes, which don't have time limits like these). Sony includes this feature on cameras without interchangeable lenses (ie: "point and shoots"), and on their high end cinema cameras, but not on their mirrorless (interchangeable lens, but not considered cinema cameras) line. Seems pretty clear this is designed to avoid their mirrorless lineup have a feature that might make it competitive with their cinema line. But they're ok including it on the point and shoot line because that already is well differentiated from the cinema camera line.
- fbn79 4y agoMaybe was not an issue but a requirements. Many DSLR have live video preview and recording functionality limited in time because of EUROPE duty classification. If the DSLR can do video without time limitations is considered a Camcorder, and so an higher import tax can be applied.
- vwoolf 4y agoan higher import tax can be applied. That hasn't been true for years: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-001277-ASW_LT.html?redirect https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...: "The Common Customs Tariff duties are fixed by the Council on proposals of the Commission. The Commission can in this context confirm that the product is part of the coverage of the revised WTO[2] Information Technology Agreement, which has been negotiated by the Commission. This means that the customs duties for camcorder will be removed after the revised agreement enters into force and thus in extension benefit EU consumers." All camera companies should have removed their artificial recording time limits via firmware.
- post_break 4y agoThat tax is now gone as of 2018 I believe.
- ho_schi 4y agoWell done Nikon :) This shall be the industry standard.
- IYasha 4y agoThis makes me wonder: what's the oldest product to receive firmware update in history? Some servers get firmware updates for more than 10 years and I consider it an acceptable minimum. )
- twbarr 4y agoIt's gotta be embedded stuff. The Space Shuttle GPC was constantly reprogrammed, including on the pad. They've sent patches to the Voyager spacecraft as recently as a few years ago [1]. 45 years, not too bad! 1 - https://www.livescience.com/nasa-makes-contact-voyager-2-long-radio-silence.html https://www.livescience.com/nasa-makes-contact-voyager-2-lon...
- IYasha 4y agoBut that wouldn't fall even into enterprise-grade equipment category, let alone consumer stuff, would it? :)
- babypuncher 4y agoThat is going to be a pretty fuzzy rabbit hole. I've seen accounts of industrial equipment where the original microcomputers from the '70s/'80s have been replaced with modern microcontrollers or single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Does it count as a "firmware update" if the new firmware comes with a new embedded computer to run it?
- IYasha 4y agoNo, that's cheating! :) Or an upgrade. It's essentially the same as replacing your 386 PC with a modern x86-compatible PC. Most likely.
- rplst8 4y agoI wonder if us D800 owners will ever get a fix for the awful right side focus issues that plagued that camera.
- buildbot 4y agoRadical PoV: All hardware should require the release of sources/documentation after a certain period as a way of recycling consumer e-waste.
- neoromantique 4y agoHopefully this will be common sense rather than radical in the future. Reduce Reuse Repair et all
- asdff 4y agoGood. Honestly DSLRs have gotten "more than good enough" for just about anything you'd throw at it 15 years ago. Newer DSLRs might be a little stronger in lower light but not by as much as you'd expect. Video capabilities are also a lot better in the new ones, but if you don't care about that, there isn't much you are losing buying a camera like a 5d mkiii (or even an older 5d) today. Unless maybe you are a pixel peeper.
- ngcc_hk 4y agoI think I still have that as it is hard to sell old camera. May have a look :-).