oldwino
Well-known
More stories (on the Pixii Facebook group) about the rangefinder being out of vertical alignment right out of the box, and Pixii being unresponsive to the problem. Does anyone here have that issue?
More stories (on the Pixii Facebook group) about the rangefinder being out of vertical alignment right out of the box, and Pixii being unresponsive to the problem. Does anyone here have that issue?
Yeah - I just had to get into the habit of checking the shutter speed in the viewfinder if it's set to A-priority. Which is not very often tbh. As mentioned, I'm an M2 shooter and like to do things the same way.I do find that it does not like to be hurried and will stumble occasionally when it is hurried. What happens is I get a bad exposure.
Yeah, that's the problem with this camera. Not necessarily the RF adjustment...just if you have problems it can get expensive quickly shipping wise and if you live in a country that is tariff and tax crazy, you can get charged wrongly when they think you just bought the camera.What are you going to do..
Ship it back to France for every lil thing that goes wrong like RF adjustment?
Is the RF user adjustable?
When I returned my A1571 for the upgrade to A2572 PIxii sent explicit instructions and shipping label images to insure not getting charged for a return to maker for repairs. I have seen mention of some countries charging exorbitant fees for this turnaround. From my experience living in a Third World country this is an inducement for a bribe to "make it all go away." Were it me in that situation I would offer up the question to the "authorities" of whether or not there might be another way. There most often is.Yeah, that's the problem with this camera. Not necessarily the RF adjustment...just if you have problems it can get expensive quickly shipping wise and if you live in a country that is tariff and tax crazy, you can get charged wrongly when they think you just bought the camera.
Yes, this the the vexing problem. I am a couple of hours from reddotrepair and have known Jadon, the chief, to be good, accurate and quite capable. So should I go up to him? The big question would be if he can get into the body without damaging it. I'll have to chat with him. But other than software/firmware mistakes I have made the camera has worked well for as long as I have owned it.Many courier companies charge a set fee to handle imports and exports. I've had FedEx charge me more in handling fees that the item was actually taxed.
The rangefinder mechanism is one of the tricky things to deal with. I must say I had a film M6 in the 90's and travelled the world multiple times and never had a problem. I bought an Epson RD 1s and had the rangefinder go out on me twice in a year, so ended up selling it.
I think these days you should have a local tech that can calibrate the rangefinder. As has just been mentioned, even if it is recalibrated by Pixii, it can be knocked out again during the shipping back to you.
That's reasonable... it would be likely $300 from Chile and back. Also, it is hard for me to talk in Spanish and get my point across... I'm still learning. I would be very nervous that they would charge me taxes etc and then hold it hostage for a very long time while I iron things out in my bad Spanish. That said, I no longer care about rangefinders anymore. I am firmly an AF fan I have found. I care about small rangefinder shaped cameras more than the rangefinder mechanism. The Pixii is cool though and they've pulled off a minor miracle in my view.If you can get US$100 round trip to Pixii it is a bargain.
I should hope so. It cost $3000 and you have only had it two years.But other than software/firmware mistakes I have made the camera has worked well for as long as I have owned it.
It really depends on the camera. As I said, I never babied my film M6. I had it for more than ten years and never had an issue with the rangefinder mechanism. On the other hand, I had the rangefinder go out of calibration twice in 18 months with my Epson RD1s, and I was using it a lot less than my old M6.These things are much more robust than what I hear being said on today's photo forums.
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I'd be interested to read about your experiences in that second week. Wait, are you the youtube guy who works at an arts centre?FYI... today I got my Pixii back from its tour to France, where I had sent it after I somehow managed to render it unbootable after installing a development software update. (Pixii has a slick web-based remote terminal tool that lets you watch the boot process in verbose mode; doing this I could see that the camera was actually starting up just fine until it came time to initialize the I2C bus, which was failing after receiving garbled parameters... my guess is that when I had done a "hard reset", aka remove/replace battery, during a startup, I had scrambled some of the setup strings. Incidentally, if none of the above means anything to you, you probably are NOT an ideal Pixii customer!) When I encountered this problem, the Pixii peeps told me that they could undoubtedly solve it immediately by reflashing my camera over the internet -- apparently there's another slick remote tool for that -- but I opted to send it in so they could make sure the underlying problem wasn't failure of some hardware component.
Anyway, since I was sending it back anyway (at Pixii's expense, BTW) I was invited to include a note of anything else I would like for them to look at, so I mentioned that the vertical alignment of the rangefinder image seemed a bit uncertain, and seemed unusually sensitive to keeping the eye perfectly centered behind the eyepiece... letting the eye drift even slightly out of position would lead to the vertical alignment changing or getting "cloudy." I had been willing to accept some pickiness as the price of the very compact dimensions of the rangefinder module, but I wanted to make sure it was set up as well as possible.
Anyway, as noted, the camera came back today (after several annoying UPS misadventures) and not only does it start up correctly, but the rangefinder is hugely better... I would almost go so far as to say transformed. I don't know what they might have done to it, but not only are the images perfectly aligned vertically and horizontally, but the eye-placement sensitivity is gone -- I can just pick it up and use it without taking any special care to center my eye, the same way I use my Bessa R3m or Epson R-D1 (my favorite RFs.)
I'll be able to give it a real wringing-out next week, since my workplace is in the middle of a three-week summer study program for which I typically shoot several hundred photos per day. I had to do the first week with my Fujifilm X-H2, since the Pixii was still on vacation, but I'll be very glad to have it back for the second week!