60D going nuts

Back in the spring I bought a new 60D and was very happy with it however almost from the start it had some interesting quirks which appear to be getting worse. The first is a tendency for the shutter not to keep up when I burst shoot. Rather than hold down the shutter release and let the camera do the work I find I can get a much faster burst by simply hitting the shutter release as many times and as fast as I need to. Some may consider this technique to be abusive however I have a 350D and 30D which both endured the same treatment without any adverse effects so I'm a little disappointed that the 60D seems to be such a delicate flower in comparison.

A further development is that occasionally the camera will become what I can only describe as bewildered. For instance the AF function will move from the button I've assigned it to another one. This weekend it refused to allow me to change the ISO and quite regulary it would not allow me to review my pictures. All of these issues would resolve themselves after a few minutes with no apparent input from myself, turning off, removing batteries, cleaning contacts etc seemed to have no effect and it almost felt like I needed to give the camera time to sort itself out.

A search of the forum has thrown up similar problems for others but it seems the usual culprit is a button getting jammed on the grip however I don't use a grip so it's not that. I did have a speedlight attached and the batteries were beginning to fail so it wasn't recycling fast enough to fire on every burst so I don't know if that could have added to the confusion.

I guess my next step is to modify my shooting technique and see if that changes anything however this will be difficult as it's a habit picked up from many years of troublefree shooting so are there any other suggestions? Has anyone else experieced or heard of similar incidents? Does the camera need to go back to Canon or will a firmware upgrade do the trick (currently 1.0.9)?

If you have exhausted all possible user-related ideas (e.g. accidentally changing the shooting mode, or some other bizarre setting change; about-to-fail battery, etc), then I think you should send it back to Canon. Only trouble with this is that it sounds like one of those pesky intermittent problems which will absolutely not manifest itself when they look at it. But maybe they could pinpoint the problem just from a good description of it.

You certainly shouldn't have to live with it acting like this, IMHO.

Intermittent problems can take a LOT of time to make it reoccur. As a mechanic those were the time eaters that could throw off your entire day. Try to duplicate the settings whan the issue occurs most frequently and keep a log of what the settings were when the problem surfaces. With the labor rates being what they are, anything you can do to make their job easier AND quicker the less your going to shell out.

Thanks chaps and you're right about the difficulties of trying to diagnose intermittant problems. I think the key here is the shutter lag problem as it does that pretty much every time I shoot so I think my next step is to improve my technique. Interestingly whilst trying to test it today I've discovered that I was fooling myself when I thought I could release the shutter faster than the camera so this is probably a good area to deal with first and then see if the problems continue.

I still haven't upgraded the firmware on my 60D and I bought it when it first released back then...no issues still.

What are your settings and what are the conditions when you are trying to shoot in burst mode?

Also what card brand/speed rating do you have.

Yes, perhaps it is your card. I cannot believe that you can press the shutter five times per second, which is the burst rate of your camera. You refer to a shutter lag and needing to improve your technique. The should be no shutter lag !

If you know someone with a faster sd card (class ten), try it and see if that is the problem.

I reread some of this and I'm thinking that perhaps the OP isn't pre-focusing and getting "shutter lag" by pressing the shutter from top to bottom in one press. That makes the camera have to focus and then take the picture. The proper technique is to press the shutter half down to focus, wait for it to focus, and then press the rest of the way to take the picture. If you are in burst mode at this point, with a fast card, it will take five pics per second till you release the button.

Maybe this helps?

RAH1861 wrote in post #13108913
Yes, perhaps it is your card. I cannot believe that you can press the shutter five times per second, which is the burst rate of your camera. You refer to a shutter lag and needing to improve your technique. The should be no shutter lag !

If you know someone with a faster sd card (class ten), try it and see if that is the problem.

The card is a class 10 so no worries there and I mentioned earlier that I've discovered that I was fooling myself when I thought I could shoot faster then the camera. What I mean by shutter lag is that I would shoot 4 shots in quick succession, 3 would fire ok but the fourth would be late. Kind of 1..2..3....4. I know that's not the definition of shutter lag but it seemed a good way of explaining what was happening. Obviously a 60D doesn't suffer from shutter lag in the usual sense so apologies for any confusion.

RAH1861 wrote in post #13109135
I reread some of this and I'm thinking that perhaps the OP isn't pre-focusing and getting "shutter lag" by pressing the shutter from top to bottom in one press. That makes the camera have to focus and then take the picture. The proper technique is to press the shutter half down to focus, wait for it to focus, and then press the rest of the way to take the picture. If you are in burst mode at this point, with a fast card, it will take five pics per second till you release the button.

Maybe this helps?

I'm not using the shutter to focus, thats the first thing I change when I take a new camera out of the box. I think that the problem is the camera can't cope with this kind of abuse, despite the 350D and 30D being perfectly happy so I just need to modify my technique so I'm using the camera the way Canon intended.

Try shooting with all the variables optimized -- small jpegs and getting a great exposure at ISO 100 of a scene with little detail (say a blue sky, set the lens to AF, and, it should go without saying, shoot in One Shot AF (not AI Servo).

Then with a chuckle, a well-regarded POTN member got a 40D shortly after it was released, and then posted a thread here, saying he could not get the 40D to shoot at the advertised fps rate and wondered why?

A bit into the thread he posted abashedly that he had the camera set to Slow Speed Continuous, not even realizing there was a High Speed Continuous option!