FS7: Sony May Lose My Business Over $15

V

Viddovation

Veteran
For years, I've had a joke. It's not a terribly funny joke, but it was a joke I was always proud of. I essentially boiled down to telling people that Sony's unofficial slogan ought to be "Sony: It Works." Of all the legitimate gripes leveled at Sony, and all the reasonable justifications, both subjective and objective for choosing other camera systems, I was always proud of the reliability of my Sony equipment. As shooters we may spend inexorable amounts of time discussing why one camera generates a more pleasing image than another, but for my clients the rock solid reliability of the Sony cameras to perform as expected always trumped any doubts I ever had.

The Sony PXW-FS7 has shattered that trust. Worse, now faced with a legitimate and specific warranty claim, I'm downright offended by what Sony considers professional customer service. Firstly, no matter how much I've defended it, the truth is the PXW-FS7 is buggy. I'm not talking about a lack of feature implementation - the features that do exist don't always work reliably or properly - even with the latest firmware. Many of these have been documented and discussed ad nauseum on this forum. I won't harp on them again here. But fundamentally, I've never owned a professional Sony product before that was this buggy and unreliable. That's the injury.

Here's the insult: I bought a UWP-D16 kit and the interface shoe, wanting to take advantage of improved audio and other advantages the system offers. It's really just as nifty a piece of kit as Alister Chapman will tell you. Here's where it gets bad: while shooting for a client, I started to hear weird electronic beeps and buzzes. They were intermittent and defied easy trouble shooting. Was the issue with settings? With firmware? With hardware? With frequencies and the location? With time and testing I've become confident it's a hardware issue, but I can't determine whether it's the camera, the interface shoe, or the wireless receiver that is at fault. I spoke with Sony Technical and their guess was the SMAD-P3 interface shoe, which is about a $60 part. Per Sony policy, I'm expected to pay shipping to send it in for repair.

For me, it's a customer service issue, and I explained so at length on the call. I've spent over $50,000 in professional Sony equipment, and when I'm sold a defective $60 part, Sony's answer is for me to spend another $15 to get it repaired. But worse is - they were just guessing it's that part which is defective. I could end up spending more time and money sending in the wireless and the camera if they don't find fault with the shoe. And given that it's an intermittent problem, I run the risk that they return each individual part being unable to replicate the problem. But let's say it is the $60 shoe at fault, and they agree. Being only a $60 part, they may simply replace instead of repair, and then I've spent the shipping just for them to end up sending me a new part.

This is not something I can easily reconcile. This equipment fault has already cost me far more than $15 in ruined, irreplaceable footage. Sony's not legally responsible for that. But where is the human decency to stand behind your product and make right the fault that you can? Why is a professional services company so casually willing to lose the loyalty of a long term customer over a warranty repair shipping charge for an item that weighs less than 1 pound and may have been defective from the day of purchase?

I can't make my joke anymore. And I'm not laughing. With the Sony PXW-FS7, Sony doesn't work.
 
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With every piece of gear that I've bought that had to be replaced under warranty I always had to pay shipping to get the item to the repair facility, and then they pay for shipping to send it back to me. To me this is normal business practice, and I would not expect anything different.

Also, can't you record audio without using the SMAD-P3 shoe to test to see if your audio problems go away ? ( it might even be a radio-interference shielding issue with the SMAD-P3 )

Not trying to rain on your parade, but it doesn't sound like Sony has done anything wrong here.
 
TheDingo said:
With every piece of gear that I've bought that had to be replaced under warranty I always had to pay shipping to get the item to the repair facility, and then they pay for shipping to send it back to me. To me this is normal business practice, and I would not expect anything different.

Also, can't you record audio without using the SMAD-P3 shoe to test to see if your audio problems go away ? ( it might even be a radio-interference shielding issue with the SMAD-P3 )

Not trying to rain on your parade, but it doesn't sound like Sony has done anything wrong here.
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Sony hasn't done anything that violates their stated policies. That said, I genuinely don't feel like a valued customer, and I am not inspired to spend more money on Sony products. I believe that there can be extenuating circumstances to stated policies.

As for your technical query: Yes, I can record without the SMAD-P3 shoe, but that doesn't prove the fault is the shoe. Both the camera and the receiver has separate routing where the SMAD-P3 shoe is concerned, so the fault is not necessarily in the shoe even if the problem only occurs when routed through the shoe.
 
Viddovation said:
Yes, I can record without the SMAD-P3 shoe, but that doesn't prove the fault is the shoe.
Click to expand...

So this might be one of those items where you have to wait for a firmware update to solve the problem, and in the meantime you avoid using the shoe until this is sorted out. The SMAD-P3 was not designed specifically for the FS7, so it's possible that there is a compatibility issue right now.
 
One thing I have noticed since shooting with mine last October is the camera does make warning sounds in the headphone jack. Whenever it kicks on I get very nervous but remember none of it is actually recorded to the file. Freaks me out a bit. Hope yours isn't a defect. When I had to send my Sony, Canon, Panasonic gear in for repair it was out of pocket shipping costs under warranty. Only time I never paid for shipping was with the Nikon D600 replacement shutter for the dust/oil issues which they paid for round trip shipping. Hope your situation brightens up.
 
TheDingo said:
So this might be one of those items where you have to wait for a firmware update to solve the problem, and in the meantime you avoid using the shoe until this is sorted out. The SMAD-P3 was not designed specifically for the FS7, so it's possible that there is a compatibility issue right now.
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That's inaccurate. It was designed with the FS7 in mind, although not exclusively. I'd be happy to share my audio test file with you. This is not a firmware issue, or else others like Alister Chapman and Net Soltz would likely have reported it. Also, I've duplicated it on both firmware 1.1 and 2.0. Firmware 2.0 included a number of improvements for audio on the FS7 including expansion from 2 assignable channels to 4, and more option directly related to the shoe mount. It makes no logical sense that this is purely a firmware issue.
 
Babu said:
One thing I have noticed since shooting with mine last October is the camera does make warning sounds in the headphone jack. Whenever it kicks on I get very nervous but remember none of it is actually recorded to the file. Freaks me out a bit. Hope yours isn't a defect. When I had to send my Sony, Canon, Panasonic gear in for repair it was out of pocket shipping costs under warranty. Only time I never paid for shipping was with the Nikon D600 replacement shutter for the dust/oil issues which they paid for round trip shipping. Hope your situation brightens up.
Click to expand...

Thanks. In this case, the fault is definitely recorded to the file. Verified.

I'm pretty insulted by the idea that I have to pay because they've made a faulty product. If the FS7 was otherwise still a reliable product, it wouldn't be a big deal. But it's the one on top of the other, and it feels as though Sony no longer stands behind their products or bothers to make a reliable product in the first place.
 
Viddovation said:
Sony hasn't done anything that violates their stated policies. That said, I genuinely don't feel like a valued customer, and I am not inspired to spend more money on Sony products. I believe that there can be extenuating circumstances to stated policies.
Click to expand...

Agree 100%, they should be apologetic when something fails and do everything they can to put things right - and still say sorry!

I think this is partly a result of the relatively low price of much of the "professional" gear around at the moment. In the past the sort of Sonys you're talking about being bombproof were £70,000 when releases (all the Betacams came in around that). At that price range you can afford to use highest quality components and pay for tons of R&D to get them right.

Steve
 
I can understand feeling insulted. They recently lost Matthew on Twitter a big supporter of theirs to bad (Japan) customer service. It happens and sucks when it does happens.
 
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I have a good friend that is fighting with a odd, repeatable flare issue on his F5 that somehow involves the ND filter wheel. My F55 never had the issue. We have spent weeks troubleshooting and isolating the problem methodically. There is a thread about it on the Sony Community board, and a few other people have it as well. It is almost certainly a small defect/oversight in the manufacturing of the filter wheel, probably effects one run/batch.

He gently "prodded" and cajoled the large, Los Angeles value added professional reseller to reproduce the problem, 2 weeks into their investigation he had to go in to show them how to reproduce it, after which the response was "oh, yes, That's not right". "We'll send to Sony". Later they tried to bill for the investigation, where the camera is still under warranty and he spent $20K there.

Sony had the camera for a week, it came back yesterday, they "fixed a light leak on right side of body". The flare is still reproducible.

My personal beefs with Sony are long and boring. Most of them stem from marketing and policy actions that are the result of Sony blindly flailing it's way through the new reality of professional and semi-professional camera sales. Last year I cut my losses and doubled down on higher-quality, more expensive equipment. So far that decision is paying dividends.

I continue to lurk in the Sony boards partly out of habit, partly because I'm curious if Sony will fix it's problems. They have extremely talented engineers (I've met a few), and I know they can do amazing things (F65). But they are going to have to change their ways, there's a dark side to Sony's new market competitiveness and it's leaving some of us in the cold.
 
Viddovation said:
Sony hasn't done anything that violates their stated policies. That said, I genuinely don't feel like a valued customer, and I am not inspired to spend more money on Sony products. I believe that there can be extenuating circumstances to stated policies.

As for your technical query: Yes, I can record without the SMAD-P3 shoe, but that doesn't prove the fault is the shoe. Both the camera and the receiver has separate routing where the SMAD-P3 shoe is concerned, so the fault is not necessarily in the shoe even if the problem only occurs when routed through the shoe.
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Viddovation - I certainly feel your pain. And the whole monitor LUT experience so far with the FS7 makes me feel like Stoney just don't "get it". And I understand Nate's post too. Your post is just another example of this. I would recommend talking direct to your dealer and where you purchased product(s)...rather than trying to fight thru the monolith...
 
Babu said:
I can understand feeling insulted. They recently lost Matthew ASC a big supporter of theirs to bad (Japan) customer service. It happens and sucks when it does happens.
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Matthew Allard does not belong to the American Society of Cinematographers. You have to have a pretty serious resumé to get inducted to the ASC.

Sorry to be pedantic, but in some circles those 3 letters mean huge things. I know you meant well.
 
steve phillipps said:
I think this is partly a result of the relatively low price of much of the "professional" gear around at the moment. In the past the sort of Sonys you're talking about being bombproof were £70,000 when releases (all the Betacams came in around that). At that price range you can afford to use highest quality components and pay for tons of R&D to get them right.

Steve
Click to expand...

yup! U get what u pay for.
 
Hi!
As far as strange sounds coming from the shoe are - I had a similar problem
I bought the blutooth wireless mic for the hotshoe and I had very low beeping coming from that audio input (Shoe)
I replaced the Wireless mic from amazon - but still got the beeping.
Then I found out - it is the GPS Setting.
I turned it off and now it works like a charm.
hopefully this helps
Now I have 2 XLR inputs + 1 Build in MIC and 1 from the SHOE with the blutooth mic Sony ECM-W1M

SeeYaa
Sly
 
Nate Weaver said:
I have a good friend that is fighting with a odd, repeatable flare issue on his F5 that somehow involves the ND filter wheel. My F55 never had the issue. We have spent weeks troubleshooting and isolating the problem methodically. There is a thread about it on the Sony Community board, and a few other people have it as well. It is almost certainly a small defect/oversight in the manufacturing of the filter wheel, probably effects one run/batch.

He gently "prodded" and cajoled the large, Los Angeles value added professional reseller to reproduce the problem, 2 weeks into their investigation he had to go in to show them how to reproduce it, after which the response was "oh, yes, That's not right". "We'll send to Sony". Later they tried to bill for the investigation, where the camera is still under warranty and he spent $20K there.

Sony had the camera for a week, it came back yesterday, they "fixed a light leak on right side of body". The flare is still reproducible.

My personal beefs with Sony are long and boring. Most of them stem from marketing and policy actions that are the result of Sony blindly flailing it's way through the new reality of professional and semi-professional camera sales. Last year I cut my losses and doubled down on higher-quality, more expensive equipment. So far that decision is paying dividends.

I continue to lurk in the Sony boards partly out of habit, partly because I'm curious if Sony will fix it's problems. They have extremely talented engineers (I've met a few), and I know they can do amazing things (F65). But they are going to have to change their ways, there's a dark side to Sony's new market competitiveness and it's leaving some of us in the cold.
Click to expand...

Thank you for taking the time to contribute Nate.

Here's an anecdote. I own an Arri L7-C LED fresnel. It's a nearly $3,000 light with a complicated power supply and LED engine. A few months ago, the warranty period expired, the light stopped functioning, and I ultimately determined it was probably a power supply fault. In contacting Arri and discussing it with a knowledgeable staff engineer, I was sent a new power supply circuit board free of charge, postage paid by Arri. The packing slip said "GOODWILL" in the billing section of the paperwork. The engineer acknowledged over the phone that the early version of the power supply my light had shipped with was prone to a diode overload. And asking me for nothing more than a shipping address, the engineer had the authority to authorize a goodwill make-right on an out of warranty piece of equipment. I never learned exactly what that power supply should have cost, but it could have easily been $500 plus. It's complicated, proprietary, and limited run.

I get that companies are run by human beings, and that mistakes and defects happen. With older Sony products I was consistently impressed by their lack of failure. Sony did very well at being reliable. By the time a Sony product failed on you, you could, if being reasonable, acknowledge that you'd abused the product in all sorts of conditions from dust to sand to rain, and that it was amazing it had lasted that long. So if you were asked to pay shipping for a warranty repair, you figured it was a good deal, and fair. But that isn't today's Sony. Today's Sony is releasing alpha coded products for professional use, and then coding firmware as they go until they lose interest in a product and move onto the next one.

The Sony Customer service agents I've spoken to today didn't seem one bit perturbed by the idea that a brand loyal Sony customer with over $50k in prior investment with the company's products over 8 years might take his future business to a competitor. I'm 30 years old. I could easily be in this business for another 30 plus years. To me, Sony not being willing to pay a $10 to $15 shipping charge on a day one defective item is tantamount to not standing behind their product. When Sony products were rock-solid reliable I could accept the fact that the giant doesn't talk to you, that the policies are set in stone. But today's Sony's products are barely half-finished and unreliable. That I could possibly accept - they're not the only manufacturer behaving in that manner. But I can't accept it if they provide unreliable products and then don't stand behind the product and make it right.

I see why you made the switch Nate.
 
Cell signals and more particularly wifi going in a phone will show up in the audio if the device is close to the camera. If there is wifi in the FS7 turn it off and see if that helps. I've had wifi come through as weird electronic chirpping and buzzing on several models of Sony cameras over the past decade.
 
sly said:
Hi!
As far as strange sounds coming from the shoe are - I had a similar problem
I bought the blutooth wireless mic for the hotshoe and I had very low beeping coming from that audio input (Shoe)
I replaced the Wireless mic from amazon - but still got the beeping.
Then I found out - it is the GPS Setting.
I turned it off and now it works like a charm.
hopefully this helps
Now I have 2 XLR inputs + 1 Build in MIC and 1 from the SHOE with the blutooth mic Sony ECM-W1M

SeeYaa
Sly
Click to expand...

Wow. Incredible. You solved it! Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

So there it is: The GPS module of the PXW-FS7 must be turned off when using the Multi-interface shoe for audio input. I'm uncertain whether this is purely a firmware issue, an inherent limitation, or implies some level of defect.

Regardless - while my immediate production problem is now resolved - my faith and trust in Sony professional products remains broken by today's events. None of Sony's engineers or customer service agents came anywhere near this solution. Sony's recent 2.0 firmware upgrade expands a host of shoe related audio properties but doesn't automatically turn off the GPS module when the shoe is activated (assuming an inherent hardware limitation, a firmware fix that automatically turns off the GPS when audio is selected from the shoe would seem to be sensible!), and no one at Sony seems aware of this devastating problem.

Now, imagine I had paid that $15 in shipping, and sent in my shoe interface. Sony would have found no fault. Then they would have had me send in my receiver at my expense, and again - found no fault. Then they would have had me send in my camera at my shipping expense, and again, quite possibly have found no fault.

I'm not going to be silly and immediately sell this camera to spite Sony, but today's events leave me with deep reservations about committing future funds to Sony equipment.
 
Viddovation said:
Thank you for taking the time to contribute Nate.

Here's an anecdote. I own an Arri L7-C LED fresnel. It's a nearly $3,000 light with a complicated power supply and LED engine. A few months ago, the warranty period expired, the light stopped functioning, and I ultimately determined it was probably a power supply fault. In contacting Arri and discussing it with a knowledgeable staff engineer, I was sent a new power supply circuit board free of charge, postage paid by Arri. The packing slip said "GOODWILL" in the billing section of the paperwork. The engineer acknowledged over the phone that the early version of the power supply my light had shipped with was prone to a diode overload. And asking me for nothing more than a shipping address, the engineer had the authority to authorize a goodwill make-right on an out of warranty piece of equipment. I never learned exactly what that power supply should have cost, but it could have easily been $500 plus. It's complicated, proprietary, and limited run.

I get that companies are run by human beings, and that mistakes and defects happen. With older Sony products I was consistently impressed by their lack of failure. Sony did very well at being reliable. By the time a Sony product failed on you, you could, if being reasonable, acknowledge that you'd abused the product in all sorts of conditions from dust to sand to rain, and that it was amazing it had lasted that long. So if you were asked to pay shipping for a warranty repair, you figured it was a good deal, and fair. But that isn't today's Sony. Today's Sony is releasing alpha coded products for professional use, and then coding firmware as they go until they lose interest in a product and move onto the next one.

The Sony Customer service agents I've spoken to today didn't seem one bit perturbed by the idea that a brand loyal Sony customer with over $50k in prior investment with the company's products over 8 years might take his future business to a competitor. I'm 30 years old. I could easily be in this business for another 30 plus years. To me, Sony not being willing to pay a $10 to $15 shipping charge on a day one defective item is tantamount to not standing behind their product. When Sony products were rock-solid reliable I could accept the fact that the giant doesn't talk to you, that the policies are set in stone. But today's Sony's products are barely half-finished and unreliable. That I could possibly accept - they're not the only manufacturer behaving in that manner. But I can't accept it if they provide unreliable products and then don't stand behind the product and make it right.

I see why you made the switch Nate.
Click to expand...

Exactly.
 
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