Audii-Dudii
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 p.1 #1 · Tale of a broken RX1... | |
Last month, I finally found a used RX1 outfit for a price I was willing to pay and bought it from a local photographer, thus scratching an itch I've had since the camera was released. Unfortunately, after just a day in my hands, it rolled off my bed while I was putting my boots on to go for a hike and landed on the carpeted floor below. While it appeared to have suffered no damage, it refused to focus, automatically or manually, and the infamous error code "E:61:00" message blinked on the display.
So I went to Precision Camera's website, received an estimate of $306.50 to repair the camera (which struck me as perhaps a bit high, but not unreasonably so), and sent it away to them the following day.
Two weeks later, they informed me the lens would have to be replaced and the repair cost would now be just over $1,200 versus the $306.50 I was originally quoted. Alas, having just bought the camera and being unemployed, that was more than I could justify spending right now, so I told them to skip the repairs and return the camera to me.
Which is where things get interesting.
While I was waiting for the broken RX1 to return, my plans suddenly changed when a friend offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to NYC to oversee some work being done to their condo (thanks to my unemployment, I have the time to do this, whereas she and her husband do not) and so I scrambled to find a replacement RX1 ASAP because walking the streets of NYC with a camera in hand is one of my favorite things to do.
Which is how I ended up buying a second used RX1 via an eBay auction, for a price that was nearly $150 less than what Precision Camera had quoted to repair the broken one. So I saved myself a few bucks over having the broken RX1 repaired and now have a parts camera to boot, which could come in handy should the second, new-to-me RX1 ever break.
But when the broken RX1 returned, I turned it on and -- surprise! -- it appeared to work just fine. I don't know what Precision Camera had done to it, if anything, but I laughed out loud at the notion my camera had somehow healed itself while in transit.
Alas, my joy was short-lived, because when I turned the camera on a second time, it was broken again and error code "E:61:00" resumed blinking on the display ... #&@(!
Which is when I discovered something interesting: As I turned the macro ring, the focus plane changed! By turning it carefully, I could focus the camera quite accurately over a range of 4-5 feet to infinity ... who knew? And then I further discovered that I could use the manual focus ring to fine-tune the focus, as spinning the ring through several rotations would shift the focus point forward or backward over a much smaller range of, say, a few inches to perhaps one foot, depending upon the focus distance.
I also discovered that, unlike my working RX1, the camera did not reset the focus to infinity whenever the power was turned off and on again, as it remained set exactly where it had been set previously and didn't change.
My curiosity now piqued, I took the broken camera with me on a hike, manually focusing each shot using the macro ring. I assumed that because the RX1 lens has a floating element, focusing with the macro ring might result in accurately focused images of less than optimal image quality because the lens elements might not be aligned properly.
But when I returned home and took a closer look at the results, to my surprise and joy, they were great!
So then I compared the handful of photos I took of my backyard before the first RX1 broke with photos of the same scenes taken with it after it returned from Precision Camera and could see no significant differences between them.
I next photographed the same scenes with the second, non-broken RX1 and compared them to the before and after photos taken with the broken RX1. While the differences I noted were very, very small, if anything, the images from the broken RX1 look just slightly more crisp (i.e., sharper) than those from the non-broken RX1!
Needless to say, I'm very much confused by what is happening here and I don't know enough about lens design in general or the RX1's lens design in specific to make sense of how the macro ring is able to accurately focus the lens and in so doing, why the image quality isn't degraded.
As it stands now, it appears I have unintentionally created / discovered the holy grail insofar as street photography is concerned: An RX1 that can be manually zone-focused and will hold its focus when the power is turned off and on!
With all of that as background, can anyone shed any light on exactly what is happening here? FWIW, if push came to shove and I could only keep one of the two cameras, believe it or not, but based upon the results I'm achieving and given how I will likely be using the RX1, my inclination would be to keep the broken one, which strikes me as being borderline insane.
Thoughts, anybody?
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