potential damage from static?

During the cold season, a lot of people wear fleece or wool material clothing. Will the static generated from these outfits damage a camera that is hanging off your neck or a p&s inside one of your pockets?

Interesting question, if anyone has had ESD damage I haven't seen it, maybe someone will speak up if they have. I am always conscious not to touch the pins on my sdcards, I can imagine destroying those easily with a static discharge. The USB port pins would be hard to get to. The rest of the camera body is either insulative or a ground, so I would think the main body would be ok, but maybe someone has had experience demonstrating otherwise.

Back in the film days, there was a danger of static from advancing the film too fast; sparks could show up in the images. These days, I don't think you'll need to worry under most conditions - the humidity/condensation from bringing unprotected gear inside after it's been cold-soaking are going to be bigger problems.

Yeah, I've wondered about condensation the last couple of walks I've done in the teens and twenties. Maybe the thing that saves the camera here in CO is that it is dry indoors too, so it doesn't have as much humidity to condense as it would have back East. The lens fogging is annoying though.

Regarding ESD, in thirty years in the semiconductor industry, most all of the problems I know of were in assembly, not at the end customer. That is why two of the three IEEE ESD test standards are assembly related I guess. So unless someone has first hand experience, the CF and sdcards are the main thing I might suspect.

And the condensation, I still wonder about that.

Static affects EXPOSED (open to touch) electronic circuitry. That is why most folks working on digital electronics wear a grounding wrist strap (which connects to Ground)...to avoid a static spark from jumping from the technicial to a circuit board he is working on!

Usually electronics within a case (or camera body) are protected from sparks by the surrounding case itself, which serves as a ground plane around the electronics. Just as you can sit inside an airplane and be unharmed during lighting strikes -- and they do happen all the time, you just are not aware of it -- the camera electronics can sit inside the camera body and be unharmed.
The protection from the outer 'ground' (case) is also why your add-on circuit boards (to add some feature to your PC) come packaged in a metallized bag
In theory you could harm the memory card when handling it, with a spark from you to one of the metal contacts.

I would think that the flash contacts would be the weakest, most vulnerable part of the camera. A direct static discharge into the contacts could damage something I'm guessing but who grabs their camera by the flash contacts. As soon as you touch the body, the electrical charge will equalize and as mentioned, the body is designed to be able to handle static.

mfturner wrote in post #17842597
Yeah, I've wondered about condensation the last couple of walks I've done in the teens and twenties. Maybe the thing that saves the camera here in CO is that it is dry indoors too, so it doesn't have as much humidity to condense as it would have back East. The lens fogging is annoying though. ...
And the condensation, I still wonder about that.

If the lens is fogging, you have condensation. Back when I lived in Illinois and condensation was a significant issue I found that keeping your hardware inside a Ziploc bag until it warms up past the dew point mitigated the condensation problem.