A consumer by the name of John Guerriero has filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony Electronics Inc. in the Southern District of New York due to claims that the shutter in the Sony A7 III is not fit for purpose, resulting in a much shorter life expectancy. than expected. The reported shutter life expectancy in the Sony A7 III is 200,000 activations, although he claims that “numerous users report shutter failures … between 10,000 and 50,000 for most users who have experienced this”.
If those errors occur outside of the one-year warranty, customers will have to pay $ 500-650 for repair or basically be stuck with a useless stone for the rest of the time. And while the expected lifespan of a shutter in no camera is a guarantee, he claims it happens often enough that it’s a bit suspicious.
According to the suit, there are telltale signs that your shutter is about to die and that it is dying in a predictable way.
Before the shutter failed, users reported hearing an atypical shutter sound, followed by the screen going black and displaying the following message: “Camera error. Switch off and on again. ‘
– Guerriero v Sony Electronics Inc., 7:21-cv-02618, No. 1 (SDNY March 26, 2021)
Although these issues do not solve the problem. The “atypical shutter sound” is always an indication that something bad is going to happen to your shutter, but Sony’s common “Camera error. Turn off and on again.” can go wrong with your camera.
Guerriero hypothesized the cause of the failure and stated that “[w]When a user removes the lens, the shutter is closed and clamped. In most cases the shutter has come loose ”, which is accompanied by several photos showing the physical malfunction. He went on to say that “the shutter blade gets caught in the front as it moves down when taking a picture … because the blades are positioned further forward so they ‘catch’ and do not clear completely”. As for the blades positioned farther forward, he says the shutter is “unusually sensitive to interference from small particles, even dust, which can cause the blades to be misaligned.”
Exactly how long after the error starts to appear that one can expect a complete error is unclear. But if that generic error message starts showing up before your warranty expires and you listen to the folks on Facebook tell you, “Just remove your battery and reinsert it, you’ll be fine” and then it dies completely after your warranty expires, then you have a high repair bill.
No manufacturer uses the expected shutter life as a warranty, but the vague error message that means nothing to most consumers coupled with the apparent frequency that the suit suggests that such a malfunction is occurring is definitely something I think is worth it. should be looked at – especially when most manufacturers are extremely conservative in the life expectancy of their shutter. I have three Nikon DSLRs here that are 2-10x their estimated life expectancy, for example.
You can read the full suit here.
It’s going to be an interesting case to follow, and I’m curious how many of our readers have experienced such a failure with the A7 III. Not surprisingly, DIYP is being approached by many photographers and I would have thought that if this were as common an issue as the suit suggests, we would have heard more about it by now.
[via Law Street]