Scheduled Maintenance F35

B

bigmitch

Active member
Just curious if anyone has sent their F35 into Sony for maintenance or for a good cleaning? Just trying to find out if its worth the hassle.

Camera is still running good, but seems like its a good time to have this done going into a slow part of the year for me.

Also the menu dial on the side of the camera needs some work. It seems a tad loose not registering the movements sometimes.

Just want to know if anyone has dealt with this and how it went for them.. Thank you!!
 
If the camera is running fine, DO NOT DO ANYTHING TO IT!! I also hear that Sony repair services are an utter nightmare though I have not personally used them.
The menu dial is a problem in both the f35 and f65. It skips an item or goes backwards instead of forward. Not sure if that is the case with all units or just you and I have the same problem. If you hold both fingers firmly or its rim and press a little bit as you roll, the issue is usually mitigated.
 
somewhere in Japan, most likely, is a small group of people who designed the F35. Where are they now? Who knows, they don’t give credit for cameras at Sony. This “skunkworks” inside Sony designed the F23 with super 35mm in mind, worked with Panavision to develop the tech to make single chip CCD possible for the F35 as it was thought it would be like a film camera cycle: 10-15 years.

There is a “2k” firmware sitting on a memory stick forgotten. The F35 progress was all but abandoned at Sony.

Sorry not really answering the question but the people who actually designed and built and programmed the F35 would be a fascinating resource, they are hidden from us. Besides ordering parts, Sony is of 0 use or help to the F35 community.

All the click wheels are crap. Also once you are setup, I don’t use the buttons hardly ever. Black balance seems to be the only one I frequent. But if you want, replacing that part yourself would not be big difficulty. Explore Sony pro parts website , Sony F35 is called F35/US in search. You can see nearly every piece of F35 and it’s price in the exploded views. Replacing the actual click wheel is about 10 minutes of work.

Clean the fans out is all you need to do. Compressed air, take camera sides off if you have been in dirty location or feel camera is dirty.

I am very cautious to clear IR glass. If you look close enough you can almost always find scratches on them.

Check your back focus professionally once if you want.

Shoot a solid color backgrounds and look for the last few bad pixels. All F35’s have stuck pixels, usually the bright ones are easy to spot but most miss 1 or 2 grey ones that kind of blend in. Shoot at high gain and see if you have any that are still sticking around. Black balance seems to have trouble with the hardest to see ones. Once you go through the manual process of zapping a pixel, the camera remembers its location.

I couldn’t believe the complexity of the F65 in moving parts/airflow/cable location compared to the F35. I think the F35 will outlast many F65’s especially those rotary shutters. The F35 sensor block has a huge array of massive older style capacitors, we will see when things like this start to get old what happens.
 
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Hey Ray, haha yea I hear you on that. I just love this camera so much I just want to make sure I take care of it best I can so I can have it as long as possible. Yup thats whats happening with the dial. My only concern is that it seems to be getting worse. Has yours always been the same? or do you feel it deteriorating as time goes on?


RayZan said:
If the camera is running fine, DO NOT DO ANYTHING TO IT!! I also hear that Sony repair services are an utter nightmare though I have not personally used them.
The menu dial is a problem in both the f35 and f65. It skips an item or goes backwards instead of forward. Not sure if that is the case with all units or just you and I have the same problem. If you hold both fingers firmly or its rim and press a little bit as you roll, the issue is usually mitigated.
Click to expand...
 
Hey yachacha, thanks for the info much appreciated. Yes, I have everything set up. For my last shoot I had to switch between 24 and 60 every now and then and the dial made it kinda a pain but other than that your absolutely right I dont use it much. Glad to know that I could fix it if needed. I think I'll leave it alone for now until it gets really bad. Do you know if you can use an assignable button for changing the shoot mode like going from 24 to 60?

Any advise on cleaning or maintenance like you stated before I find extremely valuable. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to the internal workings of the F35. So just keep an eye on the fans and clean em out every now and then and thats all I should really do?

Also thanks for letting me know sony is 0 help to the community. Saved me a lot of time from going down that rabbit hole.


yachacha said:
somewhere in Japan, most likely, is a small group of people who designed the F35. Where are they now? Who knows, they don’t give credit for cameras at Sony. This “skunkworks” inside Sony designed the F23 with super 35mm in mind, worked with Panavision to develop the tech to make single chip CCD possible for the F35 as it was thought it would be like a film camera cycle: 10-15 years.

There is a “2k” firmware sitting on a memory stick forgotten. The F35 progress was all but abandoned at Sony.

Sorry not really answering the question but the people who actually designed and built and programmed the F35 would be a fascinating resource, they are hidden from us. Besides ordering parts, Sony is of 0 use or help to the F35 community.

All the click wheels are crap. Also once you are setup, I don’t use the buttons hardly ever. Black balance seems to be the only one I frequent. But if you want, replacing that part yourself would not be big difficulty. Explore Sony pro parts website , Sony F35 is called F35/US in search. You can see nearly every piece of F35 and it’s price in the exploded views. Replacing the actual click wheel is about 10 minutes of work.

Clean the fans out is all you need to do. Compressed air, take camera sides off if you have been in dirty location or feel camera is dirty.

I am very cautious to clear IR glass. If you look close enough you can almost always find scratches on them.

Check your back focus professionally once if you want.

Shoot a solid color backgrounds and look for the last few bad pixels. All F35’s have stuck pixels, usually the bright ones are easy to spot but most miss 1 or 2 grey ones that kind of blend in. Shoot at high gain and see if you have any that are still sticking around. Black balance seems to have trouble with the hardest to see ones. Once you go through the manual process of zapping a pixel, the camera remembers its location.

I couldn’t believe the complexity of the F65 in moving parts/airflow/cable location compared to the F35. I think the F35 will outlast many F65’s especially those rotary shutters. The F35 sensor block has a huge array of massive older style capacitors, we will see when things like this start to get old what happens.
Click to expand...
 
bigmitch said:
Hey Ray, haha yea I hear you on that. I just love this camera so much I just want to make sure I take care of it best I can so I can have it as long as possible. Yup thats whats happening with the dial. My only concern is that it seems to be getting worse. Has yours always been the same? or do you feel it deteriorating as time goes on?
Click to expand...

I bought the camera heavily used so not sure if the dial was ever better. It tends to act up at the worst times. I have no idea why Sony didn't allow any of the assignable buttons to be programmed for white balance. I have to set daylight or Tungsten color temp using the wheel. And you have to get it right with the F35 not just for monitoring but also for image quality since the color temp gets baked in the prores files. It would have been nice to press a button and switch from 3200k to 5000k. With the F65 you can't program the ND filters selection and instead go through the menus with the wheel as well. Once again, if you press firmly on the wheel (but not hard enough to make a selection) as you turn it, it works well.
 
yachacha said:
somewhere in Japan, most likely, is a small group of people who designed the F35. Where are they now? Who knows, they don’t give credit for cameras at Sony. This “skunkworks” inside Sony designed the F23 with super 35mm in mind, worked with Panavision to develop the tech to make single chip CCD possible for the F35 as it was thought it would be like a film camera cycle: 10-15 years.

There is a “2k” firmware sitting on a memory stick forgotten. The F35 progress was all but abandoned at Sony.

Sorry not really answering the question but the people who actually designed and built and programmed the F35 would be a fascinating resource, they are hidden from us. Besides ordering parts, Sony is of 0 use or help to the F35 community.
.
Click to expand...

Yeah these people I would love to find.

But that 2k software thing sounds like conspiracy theory more than actual existing. Or are there any actual record of the 2k footage (except for the Sony pamphlets?)

C
 
The 2K update doesn't sound far-fetched; it's just a few more pixels for a proper 2K DCP projection as 1080p isn't an official format although it would of course work.

And the rest sounds true too; big corporations working with smaller, brighter, unknown groups - especially back then - and eventually acquiring them and/or bringing some in-house.
 
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