I have been experiencing an EVF eye sensor glitch with my A9 II. When the sun is behind my neck sometimes the camera doesn’t activate the EVF when I raise the rig up to my eye. The finder is dead and refuses to turn on until I put my hand behind it and wave a couple of times. It has happened repeatedly and I have missed a couple of epic shots because of this. It is incredibly frustrating. I think the eye sensor dynamic range is low and saturates when the sun gets on it..
Yes I've experienced it and I'm fairly certain I've read about it on here a few times over the years.
It is super annoying especially when you are reacting to an important moment.
I have the problem with my A9. It seems as if the sensor is too sensitive as just my shadow will switch the LCD to the EVF. I have cleaned it quite thoroughly to no avail.
I have assigned CF3 to manually switch between the two but I would prefer the Auto feature to that. It has caught me out a few times when some bird or some such thing pops up while I am looking at the LCD. It takes some thought to switch before trying to find the subject in the EVF.
Not keen on having to send the body to a service centre but that may be the fix.
FWIIW my A7R3 is fine although it has not had the same amount of use.
I called Sony pro and to my pleasant surprise the advisor was quite knowledgeable and explained that the behavior very well. He had observed it himself. It is likely to coming from a 2nd proximity sensor that is fitted behind the main LCD. The idea is to prevent the shadow of your body activating the EVF when shooting at hip level. When shooting with the 600 f/4 hand held the user is likely to put the camera and lens facing down periodically which would activate the rear LCD proximity sensor and shot off the EVF. When picking up the camera with the sun behind you the EVF sensor is saturated so the camera relies to proximity sensor to activate EVF but this sensor is not very accurate and may not work all the time. This happens even if you set display to EVF only. (EVF will still turn off when you lower the camera)
The solution is to use a piece of tape to cover the eye sensor. The EVF will never turn off and the proximity sensor will not engage.
Not the most elegant solution but it should avoid missing the shot. Battery usage will increase and you have to remember to take the tape off at the end of the shoot
It might be worth sending an email to Sony support or call pro support if you have a membership. If more people complain they might consider fixing it or at least provide a menu option that keeps EVF on no matter what.
I don't think it reflects well on a camera marketed as Professional level equipment to have to resort to taping things over to have it operate as it is designed. Sony should do better than that.
In the meantime as I mentioned, I assigned C3 on my A9 to Toggle between the EVF and the LCD. Either one remains active until you toggle to the other one. Maybe there is a better way to do this and I would be interested in any suggestions.
Lotuselite wrote:
I don't think it reflects well on a camera marketed as Professional level equipment to have to resort to taping things over to have it operate as it is designed. Sony should do better than that.
In the meantime as I mentioned, I assigned C3 on my A9 to Toggle between the EVF and the LCD. Either one remains active until you toggle to the other one. Maybe there is a better way to do this and I would be interested in any suggestions.
That option does not help much with this issue unfortunately . Even if you set the camera to EVF only it does not help. The EVF will still turn off automatically with the proximity sensor engaging when you put the camera down (to save power and EVF life). Then when you pick it up in certaint situations the EVF will be off and shot will be missed
arbitrage wrote:
This issue is now like 10x worse on the A1....
I think it's hard to quantify that at this point. When it happens to you, it happens constantly, and I know how that can feel. A few days ago my R4 wouldn't quit doing this. But in the long run, across a lot of daily shooting, it probably happens less than once a month. Time will tell if the a1 is worse.
tripleR6 wrote:
I think it's hard to quantify that at this point. When it happens to you, it happens constantly, and I know how that can feel. A few days ago my R4 wouldn't quit doing this. But in the long run, across a lot of daily shooting, it probably happens less than once a month. Time will tell if the a1 is worse.
For sure. But it happened at 3 different locations today. All three of which I've been shooting the RIV and A9II at for the past year. I've had it happen on the RIV and A9II but it was relatively infrequent. Today was brutal. And many others already reported it from their first outings yesterday or Tuesday.
Has the A7SIII been overly bad? It shares the same EVF sensor as the A1 and maybe that new position is making it more frequent than with the older positions
arbitrage wrote:
Has the A7SIII been overly bad? It shares the same EVF sensor as the A1 and maybe that new position is making it more frequent than with the older positions
Actually, I wasn’t aware that this is a problem until recent mention in one of the A1 threads. I had it happen only few times thus far. 5 times tops since October. I will definitely pay a closer attention to it now and will try to replicate it. I will also keep an eye on A1’s behavior.
kosin wrote:
Actually, I wasn’t aware that this is a problem until recent mention in one of the A1 threads. I had it happen only few times thus far. 5 times tops since October. I will definitely pay a closer attention to it now and will try to replicate it. I will also keep an eye on A1’s behavior.
Someone claimed that the latest new firmware would have fixed this for him on his A7S3. Have you updated your camera?
Out of curiosity, how many people that have had this eye sensor glitch wear glasses? I wear reading glasses, and the one time I had a bad problem with this on my A7Riv, I was wearing my glasses. Granted, this is extremely limited data, but I thought I might ask. In my case, I had been reviewing some images on the rear screen (which for me requires glasses) and saw some action I wanted to catch. Never got a shot off as viewfinder never came on. It was the same scenario referred to here a couple times, strong light from behind me. When I took my glasses off, everything worked ok again. Normally, I don’t look through he viewfinder with my reading glasses on. Anyway, I am curious if part of the issue is glasses.
