Overheating Z9?

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PAUL50

PAUL50

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My Z9 began developing increasing amounts of static, visible in the EVF and Monitor screens, that had grown increasingly worse over the past several days. It seemed to take time to develop. I've been re-programing the settings over the past several days and so the camera has been on almost continuously for multiple hours each day. Today, after numerous hours of work, I realized first that the static had returned and that the buttons on the lower rear of the camera stopped working all together. The vertical "I" button, the AF-ON, joy-stick, and ISO buttons designed for use in the vertical position stopped responding. Once I realized what was happening, I first turned off the camera and removed, then replaced, the battery. When that did not fix the problem, I was able to copy out the settings and then do a full reset. That didn't seem to fix the problem either and so I just put it down. After some time passed, like an hour or so, I went back to the camera and it now appears to be functioning perfectly fine. All I can conclude from this is that the camera has been overheating and the first clue seems to be the static in the screens, followed by temporary failure of a number of buttons.

To test the camera, I've gone into the Custom Settings Menu and set the Standby timer to infinity and I'm now waiting to see if the problem will repeat itself. I was aware that what I was perceiving as failures of the camera could have had something to do with operator error and so checked carefully all the settings. However, I was working on two Z9s simultaneously, doing exactly the same things, and for the same periods of time, and only one developed problems.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with their Z9, or aware of any similar complaints.
 
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I don’t know if your issue is heat-related, but I haven’t had similar issues. The hottest my Z9 has been was a day this past summer when I shot in ~95°F sunlight, and used C120 pre-capture extensively on a pair of cardinals over about ten minutes. I shot a couple thousand frames thanks to the 120fps.

The camera showed “HOT CARD” after a couple minutes, and I could feel the hand grip getting warm. The camera eventually cooled down when I left the birds. I never saw any static or problems with buttons.

I also shot a 60 minute video recently, which gave me “HOT CARD” again, but had no issues then, either.

I don’t recall hearing anyone else complain of static like this, and certainly not of failing buttons, so I think you might want to contact Nikon support to get an opinion from them.
 
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Chris K said:
I don’t know if your issue is heat-related, but I haven’t had similar issues. The hottest my Z9 has been was a day this past summer when I shot in ~95°F sunlight, and used C120 pre-capture extensively on a pair of cardinals over about ten minutes. I shot a couple thousand frames thanks to the 120fps.

The camera showed “HOT CARD” after a couple minutes, and I could feel the hand grip getting warm. The camera eventually cooled down when I left the birds. I never saw any static or problems with buttons.

I also shot a 60 minute video recently, which gave me “HOT CARD” again, but had no issues then, either.

I don’t recall hearing anyone else complain of static like this, and certainly not of failing buttons, so I think you might want to contact Nikon support to get an opinion from them.
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Thanks. Thats what I’ll be doing Monday.
 
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John Navitsky said:
what kind of card and what kind of shooting. was the battery warm when you took it out?
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It’s a Prograde 325 gb card and I wasn’t shooting. I was working on reprogramming the buttons. Interestingly, the “static” went away when I turned off the “Focus Peaking,” which was set at standard. It was as if the Focus Peaking went berserk. It wasn’t showing as if the camera was in focus on something but rather completely covered the entirety of both screens. The camera was warm, but the card and battery were not hot, just warm to the touch and I received no overheating warning. I had been working with both cameras for hours over two days. I was able to replicate the “Focus Peaking” snow storm and turning the focus peaking off stopped the problem for a second time but I was not able to replicate the failure of the buttons designed to be used in a vertical orientation. I have no doubt they failed, but they are working now. It seems that somehow the “focus peaking” storm managed to interfere with the operation of those buttons. Never seen anything like it.
 
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one thing that comes to mind is a memory leak in the sw. i semi regularly shoot for full days, but i’m powering down fairly regularly, between the action.

might be interesting to see if you can replicate it by leaving powered on for a long time, and if you can if that’s mitigated by occasionally powering down
 
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PAUL50 said:
My Z9 began developing increasing amounts of static, visible in the EVF and Monitor screens, that had grown increasingly worse over the past several days. It seemed to take time to develop. I've been re-programing the settings over the past several days and so the camera has been on almost continuously for multiple hours each day. Today, after numerous hours of work, I realized first that the static had returned and that the buttons on the lower rear of the camera stopped working all together. The vertical "I" button, the AF-ON, joy-stick, and ISO buttons designed for use in the vertical position stopped responding. Once I realized what was happening, I first turned off the camera and removed, then replaced, the battery. When that did not fix the problem, I was able to copy out the settings and then do a full reset. That didn't seem to fix the problem either and so I just put it down. After some time passed, like an hour or so, I went back to the camera and it now appears to be functioning perfectly fine. All I can conclude from this is that the camera has been overheating and the first clue seems to be the static in the screens, followed by temporary failure of a number of buttons.

To test the camera, I've gone into the Custom Settings Menu and set the Standby timer to infinity and I'm now waiting to see if the problem will repeat itself. I was aware that what I was perceiving as failures of the camera could have had something to do with operator error and so checked carefully all the settings. However, I was working on two Z9s simultaneously, doing exactly the same things, and for the same periods of time, and only one developed problems.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with their Z9, or aware of any similar complaints.
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Hi — are you able to detail the card you are using - gold or cobalt or?
CF Express Type B from Delkin Black and ProGrade Cobalt have not overheated for me even when pushed hard.
 
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John Navitsky said:
one thing that comes to mind is a memory leak in the sw. i semi regularly shoot for full days, but i’m powering down fairly regularly, between the action.

might be interesting to see if you can replicate it by leaving powered on for a long time, and if you can if that’s mitigated by occasionally powering down
Click to expand...
I was able to replicate the “Focus Peak“ snow storm ( for lack of a better way to describe it) in a little over an hour - hour and a half, and it stopped when I turned “Focus Peaking” off. I was not able to replicate the failure of the vertical oriented buttons during that same period of time, but this afternoon I’m going to maximize the timers and let it run for hours, until I run down a full 18d battery, while periodically shooting full bursts at fx and 20 fps until I fill the buffer. When the snow storm begins, this time I’ll not turn off “Focus Peaking” and see if that is what disabled the buttons. For @ajm057 the card in use at the time was a platinum ProGrade 325 GB, R: 1700MB/s and W:1500 MB/s card. Although I wasn’t doing any shooting at the time. I‘m taking out that camera shortly to test a combination of @Steve ‘s recommended settings (I’ve read his excellent new book) and personal modifications primarily to the Action/Wildlife banks.
 
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Possibly you're bumping the focus ring (that causes focus peaking to activate even when you're in AF mode and shows the "snow"). Disable A15 and see if you can replicate it.

edit: I'm not advocating to permanently disable A15, this is just to test if that's the issue you're experiencing (manual focus is still super useful to reel the lens back when it's stuck on the background). If you're indeed bumping the focus ring - consider disabling the focus peaking permanently.
 
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I swap the role of the focus ring and control rings on the z lenses that allow it and in most cases the control ring was used to control aperture. This allowed me to avoid accidently going into MF while tracking subjects. THEN to add to my insanity I put follow focus key/gear rings onto the control rings so I could quickly find them. I have asked Nikon to provide the same lens firmware update for the z400/2.8 and z800/y.3 that they provided to other s-line lenses so I can make the same changes here too. In other words try this on the 50/1.2, and see if it helps. All lenses with the new lens firmware allow such swapping and switching to linear focus options
 
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lukemeup said:
Possibly you're bumping the focus ring (that causes focus peaking to activate even when you're in AF mode and shows the "snow"). Disable A15 and see if you can replicate it.

edit: I'm not advocating to permanently disable A15, this is just to test if that's the issue you're experiencing (manual focus is still super useful to reel the lens back when it's stuck on the background). If you're indeed bumping the focus ring - consider disabling the focus peaking permanently.
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Thanks. Great idea. Doing it now.
 
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lukemeup said:
Possibly you're bumping the focus ring (that causes focus peaking to activate even when you're in AF mode and shows the "snow"). Disable A15 and see if you can replicate it.
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I have a stupid question: shouldn't PEAKing be activated only by MF? As I understand with the programmed lens-ring also by AF?
I don't use lens-rings to avoid possible bumping ;-)

@PAUL50 , my Z9 had overheated once but it brings the message like: "the camera is hot and cannot proceed" or something like that. After a minute or two of a break it was working again. So, it actually required very little time to recover.

Our gear became very complex. And it has certainly more cases for "uncaught exceptions" :)
 
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ElenaH said:
I have a stupid question: shouldn't PEAKing be activated only by MF? As I understand with the programmed lens-ring also by AF?
I don't use lens-rings to avoid possible bumping ;-)

@PAUL50 , my Z9 had overheated once but it brings the message like: "the camera is hot and cannot proceed" or something like that. After a minute or two of a break it was working again. So, it actually required very little time to recover.

Our gear became very complex. And it has certainly more cases for "uncaught exceptions" :)
Click to expand...
Focus Peaking is activated if set to ”On” in the Custom Settings Menu at A13 and you’re either in MF mode or if you override AF by operating the focus ring manually. I keep the focus ring active so I can pull focus back when it goes into the background or it needs a bump or help getting close to the target or for when I’m operating in focus stacking mode. I’m no longer sure that it’s necessary to keep that ring live to correct for AF errors but it certainly was necessary when the Z9 first came out.

It was not an over heat situation. I did everything possible to overheat the camera and the card last night and it operated without a problem. It was more like a “Focus Peaking“ storm and then it seemed the buttons intended for use in vertical shooting stopped operating.

@ajm057 and @John Navitsky - Based on what I did yesterday, by running the camera non-stop for hours without shutting it off, and repeatedly firing bursts until the buffer began to fill and show down, I concluded it wasn’t a case of overheating that caused the “Focus Peaking” storm or the vertical buttons to stop operating. What caused the buttons to stop operating was when I flipped the switch to lock the vertical shutter release button. It also locked the other buttons designed for vertical shooting. Who knew! But what caused the “focus peaking” storm remains a mystery. With setting “A15” (manual focus ring) either on or off I could not make the “storm“ repeat itself. So that remains a mystery. I’ll just have to keep going and try to pay attention to what I did should it happen again. It didn’t affect photo quality or anything else. So, I’m just treating it as one of Nikons enigmas for now!
 
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When you see noise in the EVF I would focus on the temperature of the image processor and associated circuitry. That’s where the thermal noise is likely to occur. The temperature of the card is an indication of what is going on elsewhere in the camera. That said, the processor likely has some form of heat sink and hopefully would be cooler than your card.
 
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John Navitsky said:
Paul, was the noise present in the actual images or just the evf/screen?
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Just in the EVF screen and LCD monitor. It didn’t effect photos. I’m still scratching my head but here is what I know, if “Focus Peaking“ is turned on it may happen. When it does occur, I can stop the storm by just half pressing the release button, but it will return. And, when I turn “Focus Peaking” off, it never happens.
 
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Jack McEwan said:
When you see noise in the EVF I would focus on the temperature of the image processor and associated circuitry. That’s where the thermal noise is likely to occur. The temperature of the card is an indication of what is going on elsewhere in the camera. That said, the processor likely has some form of heat sink and hopefully would be cooler than your card.
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I no longer believe the problem is associated with overheating. I did everything possible to create an overheating event under conditions similar to what I was doing at the time I first noticed the problem and couldn’t do it. I’ve isolated the issue to an apparent flaw with “Focus Peaking.” Even at that, I’ve not had a recurrence of the problem, and now I’m just proceeding along waiting for another event when I can concentrate on what I was doing to bring it about. I haven’t reported it to Nikon because I don’t have enough information yet to intelligently explain what’s happening.
 
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John Navitsky said:
it really sounds like focus peaking is being accidentally activated. you might try another lens and see if it happens there. it’s super easy to activate focus peaking on the 50 1.2
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I agree, I think that’s what starts the problem, and in the end that may be all it is, except for that peaking “storm,“ that eventually occurs, filling the entirety of the screens with what I initially incorrectly identified as noise. Well, I’m waiting and watching now!
 
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I haven't seen it.
But its more likely a single faulty chip overheating than the camera in general.
When chips start to fail they generate more heat.
Engineers often use a thermal camera to find the bad chips...🦘
 
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Roy said:
I haven't seen it.
But its more likely a single faulty chip overheating than the camera in general.
When chips start to fail they generate more heat.
Engineers often use a thermal camera to find the bad chips...🦘
Click to expand...
Thanks for the information. At this point, though, I'm just going to wait and see what happens.
 
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