Sent My Camera in For Repair...Can't Hack it Now

Vitaliy Kiselev said:
Generally, they won't hear us. This is few managers fighting for their place under the sun who make such decisions. And ability to make proper decision is always hard, as it impose risk.
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That is very true.

I was talking with a Korean man who worked for the city to approve building projects. Back then it was popular for city officials to take bribes to ignore engineering faults on the construction buildings and even bridges. One day he refused to approve a bridge and his leaders got mad at him, they worked around him and got the bridge approved. Later on the bridge collapsed, and Korean citizens died.

People are going to be greedy even in important situations, as long as they make a profit and get away with it.
 
Doppler9000 said:
I'm going to go with "not".

Panasonic sold over $183 billion US in fiscal 2009 and 2010. Not sure that better addressing the GH13 market would have reversed the losses. Now, if you are arguing that this bizarre and intentional crapping up of products is more widespread in the company and results in, say, vacuums that suck far less than they should and TVs that have intentionally poor pictures then you might have a point.
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Tthe GH line of cameras. They are great little products. I have seen some great videos from GH users, as well as many other dslr users.

But they add on just enough annoying features to it to make it annoying for indie film making use.

The hi-rez HDMI out is great, but they add the little bleeping record symbol, so that the HDMI can not be used for recording a 4:2:2 stream to an external recorder. The fast readout speed of the sensor is great, but it is held back in 24mbs/ and 17mb/s land, and perhaps for stability reasons, but then when a hack is figured out, a timely firmware update arrives, that happens to prevent mb/s increases.

It is sad to see a piece of gear being held back because it is not aimed at our target market. It is hard to see that the tech is there, right there in your hands, and yet held back by software coding that the company put in place to make sure it was annoying to the film maker. Of course, maybe they just missed it, maybe they do not even realize it is annoying, because they do not even know that film makers are even considering this as a tool?
 
I think the major issue here is that Panasonic is releasing a GH2, and they're worried about a hacked GH1 showing up the GH2. It seems like the smartest and most shrewd business maneuver to me. Of course, it doesn't satisfy customers at all, but I really don't think Panasonic is worried about this.

The issue here is that when you start really factoring in customer satisfaction and start trying to be a company that is more concerned with doing something good for an industry or a group of people, rather than making the most profit, your own production costs tend to go way up. We see this all the time: handmade guitars costs a LOT more than mass-manufactured guitars, for example. As a guitar player and guitar major at school, this is a big issue for me and really applies to other situations. For example:

It costs anywhere from a couple hundred dollars or less to $1,000 dollars just for the materials to build your own guitar. This isn't factoring in the cost of tools that you will have to buy for your first one. So let's say you're an experienced guitar builder, and you spend around $800 just for the BEST materials to build the guitar.

Then what do you do? If you're an experienced professional like James Olson (he builds a lot of acoustics for big name players), you sell it for a *starting price* of $12,000. That's for the most basic model.

A similar guitar bought from, say, Gibson (which undoubtedly makes GREAT guitars, and I'm a fan-boy of them) will run you anywhere from $1,000 to $4,500, give or take. Why is this? Because with Gibson you're buying a good product, yes, but it's a product that has had an entire factory building it so they can get it out the door in a matter of weeks as opposed to a wait time of six months to a year from someone like James Olson.

Here's the crucial question: does Gibson care if I choose to sell my Gibson, save up money, and buy and Olson-made guitar? No, they most certainly do not, and so their main goal is not pleasing me, but making a profit and perhaps pleasing me in the process or as a by-product of their success.

This is one of the reasons I love Red as a company. I've never shot on Red, but I like that their business model is not to make a major profit (yes, they need to make a profit, I know) and monopolize the market, but rather to create a camera that is good and to give something great to the industry. But that's the thing, isn't it? Red is targeted towards a small group of people: the film industry. Panasonic GH1's and GH2's are generally targeted at a wider group of people: consumers and possibly indie film makers.

The only thing that burns me up here is Panasonic locking out the firmware hack, but I can still understand why it is that they're doing it from a business standpoint. They care about as much as Best Buy does when you try to return a DVD and you say "if you don't let me return this, you'll lose a customer!" They don't care because you make up a very SMALL portion of their income.
 
tommygdawg said:
I think the major issue here is that Panasonic is releasing a GH2, and they're worried about a hacked GH1 showing up the GH2. It seems like the smartest and most shrewd business maneuver to me. Of course, it doesn't satisfy customers at all, but I really don't think Panasonic is worried about this.

The issue here is that when you start really factoring in customer satisfaction and start trying to be a company that is more concerned with doing something good for an industry or a group of people, rather than making the most profit, your own production costs tend to go way up. We see this all the time: handmade guitars costs a LOT more than mass-manufactured guitars, for example. As a guitar player and guitar major at school, this is a big issue for me and really applies to other situations. For example:

It costs anywhere from a couple hundred dollars or less to $1,000 dollars just for the materials to build your own guitar. This isn't factoring in the cost of tools that you will have to buy for your first one. So let's say you're an experienced guitar builder, and you spend around $800 just for the BEST materials to build the guitar.

Then what do you do? If you're an experienced professional like James Olson (he builds a lot of acoustics for big name players), you sell it for a *starting price* of $12,000. That's for the most basic model.

A similar guitar bought from, say, Gibson (which undoubtedly makes GREAT guitars, and I'm a fan-boy of them) will run you anywhere from $1,000 to $4,500, give or take. Why is this? Because with Gibson you're buying a good product, yes, but it's a product that has had an entire factory building it so they can get it out the door in a matter of weeks as opposed to a wait time of six months to a year from someone like James Olson.

Here's the crucial question: does Gibson care if I choose to sell my Gibson, save up money, and buy and Olson-made guitar? No, they most certainly do not, and so their main goal is not pleasing me, but making a profit and perhaps pleasing me in the process or as a by-product of their success.

This is one of the reasons I love Red as a company. I've never shot on Red, but I like that their business model is not to make a major profit (yes, they need to make a profit, I know) and monopolize the market, but rather to create a camera that is good and to give something great to the industry. But that's the thing, isn't it? Red is targeted towards a small group of people: the film industry. Panasonic GH1's and GH2's are generally targeted at a wider group of people: consumers and possibly indie film makers.

The only thing that burns me up here is Panasonic locking out the firmware hack, but I can still understand why it is that they're doing it from a business standpoint. They care about as much as Best Buy does when you try to return a DVD and you say "if you don't let me return this, you'll lose a customer!" They don't care because you make up a very SMALL portion of their income.
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You make great points. The bestbuy example is especially apt.

The guitar is more of a hardware, material, and master craftsman cost thing. The GH is simply a software issue. The tech is there, just being held back by software.

Panasonic is still making video cameras with the old business model, and that may still satisfy many, meanwhile there is a new one springing up, and is increasingly dissatisfied with their products. (dito for all the other manufacturers)

Technology in other areas has put new expectations on the video camera industry. Computer processing power has become ridiculously compact and powerful; look at the Motorola Droid. And CMOS sensor technology is being driven by cell phone cameras. It is an amazing engineering feat to get some many efficient pixels on sensors that small! The low light and noise suppression technology that is developed in these little CMOS sensors is also being applied to their bigger brothers.
 
It's true you're right. I was just using the guitar as an example of the idea that if you really want to be satisfied as a customer, you're going to pay for it. Mass production companies can't really even try to satisfy every customer, so they try to satisfy the ones that make up their largest profit margin for a certain product. I've heard that service times for cameras sent in for repair are much faster if you're sending in a higher end model in the $6k to $10k range (for most companies). Not sure of the veracity of that, but it makes sense, again getting what you pay for.

And I agree that limiting the GH1's hardware with software is quite ridiculous, but I can understand the business reasons behind doing so. And I think this is also proof that the camera industry is especially inflated. If Panasonic marketed the GH1 as a 40mbps production camera out of the box, I'm fairly certain it would cost a whole lot more than it does now.
 
Tommygdawg, I read through the posts and did not see one thing. (And if I missed it I apologize.)

Thank you for posting your experiences with the repair and replaced firmware. You have given the rest of us a heads up and something to think about before we send any GH1 out for repair.
 
You mean you couldn't find other topics pertaining to this issue?


In any case, no problem. As long some other people can work it out before it happens to them. :)
 
I did not mean other topics, I meant replies to your original post. I read a lot of debate on what you should or should not have done, or what Panasonic should or should not be doing, but not a simple thanks for posting the information - so I wanted to pass that along.

:thumbsup:
 
Panasonic (not) deliberately replacing firmware?

Panasonic (not) deliberately replacing firmware?

Vitaliy Kiselev said:
I don't think that they upgraded firmware.
Most probably MB had been replaced, just in case.
All new MBs come with 1.34 preinstalled.

And as for rants about Panasonic and his actions.
Generally, they won't hear us. This is few managers fighting for their place under the sun who make such decisions. And ability to make proper decision is always hard, as it impose risk.
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I don't now. Why is it every person I talk to about my problem almost immediately tells me the firmware has to be replaced?

An other reply I got was to reinitialize the camera. I wouldn't want to do that before storing my settings. In the store the customer service guy nicely asked if any footage on the card could be deleted. That was no problem to me. Next thing he did was reinitialize the camera, without asking this time...

I get to thinkinig it's not so "just in case" if they replaced it.

By the way, would it be possible that you overlooked anything in being able to apply hacks to any later firmware? I mean, could it be that up till now we have been able to hack more or less just by luck?

Would it be possible to allow PTool to increase the major version number to 2 and see if that makes a recognized firmware upgrade?
 
TempTag said:
...but not a simple thanks for posting the information - so I wanted to pass that along.

:thumbsup:
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Very true. Thanks Tommygdawg, for warning us, and putting the word out. :thumbsup:
 
Yes, Tommydawg, thanks for giving us a heads up and sorry for off-topic ranting on my part.

Somewhere in the stickies section of the GH1 Hack subforum there needs to be a note that sending a camera in for warranty repair potentially involving motherboard replacement will very likely result in repaired camera arriving with firmware 1.34 installed. Given how central MB is to controlling all aspects of cameras functions I would guess that any non-trivial warranty request will run a high risk of that happening.
 
Thanks all! :)


I'd just like to say that I'm not sure if they actually replaced the mobo. The parts listed were only for some fuses and strap rivets. However, I'm not sure how the fuses and all apply to overall function or if they replaced the motherboard without saying.
 
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