20D - Continous Firing and Error 99

Ok, my 20D has been in the shot twice so far, and it looks like it is heading in for a 3rd time. Tonight while shooting gobblins and ghosts, all of a sudden the camera just takes off firing. I turn it off, then on again, and it starts firing again. I open the CF door, remove the CF, still firing. Pull the battery - it stops - put another in and it's off and running again. I know Wazza had a simular problem that I think was a blown shutter box - I hope mine is not likewise as this shutter box is only a few months old.

Any of you-all had anything like this, and if so, what was the remedy?

Really... seriously.... no one else besides me and Wazza has had this problem. That is a releif because I am rapidly loosing faith in the new Canon 20/30D class equipment - they don't seem built for any heavy shooting at all. I have a couple more days on this shoot I am doing and was considering either 1) using my 10D, 2) buying a xti as a fill-in camera, or 3) buying a lens for my D200 and finnishing up with it. If no one else is really having any issues - then cool.... perhaps I just have a bad copy and I will send it into Canon Service one more time. This will be it's 4th trip in 16 months.

No , not yet (knock on wood ) But you have me scared! Please post the answer to whatever you find it is! Good luck!

Nope. How many shots on the camera? IIRC, Wazza had a whole bunch.

I am guessing roughly 65k +/- a few k. On this current shutter box probably 10K. Those are just crazy numbers since I have 4 bodies. I need to learn to shoot a whole lot more effeceintly.

I'd talk to Canon about it, if they only replaced your shutter a couple months ago.

Croasdail wrote in post #2187265
I am guessing roughly 65k +/- a few k. On this current shutter box probably 10K. Those are just crazy numbers since I have 4 bodies. I need to learn to shoot a whole lot more effeceintly.

I've never had any of those issues with my cameras. Those numbers are quite high. How do you ever have time to post process all those photos?

Mark

I don't process all of those. For example, I just shot team pictures for a league and what I typically had was between 10-20 frames for the team shot and then another 10-20 for each player. So for a typical football team that can be 500-1000 shots of players. Soccer - 400. Thank heavens for Basketball and it's smaller teams. The Soccer league I just did had 38 teams and it took two weeks to shoot. You can do the math on the number of shots. On each those I can quickly find the one of each I will end up using. Sporting events will range between 250 and 750 depending on the sport - though those are usually shot with a 1D or two.

Try removing both batteries over night.

i have bad news for you my friend, my 20d did the same thing out of the box. i had to send it to canon and told that the shutter was bad. thank god, canon repaired it free..

just a thought - stuck button?

hmongstang wrote in post #2190169
i have bad news for you my friend, my 20d did the same thing out of the box. i had to send it to canon and told that the shutter was bad. thank god, canon repaired it free..

I don't know about "repaired for free" - I think if it happened "straight out of the box" you should be looking for a simple replacement of the whole unit by the shop that sold it to you!

RgB wrote in post #2189309
Try removing both batteries over night.

Just out of curiosity, what would leaving them out overnight do? It would seem that a few seconds at most would be enough to drain any capacitance in the circuitry for a hard reset.

TeeJay wrote in post #2190311
I don't know about "repaired for free" - I think if it happened "straight out of the box" you should be looking for a simple replacement of the whole unit by the shop that sold it to you!

it was an online purchase, i contacted them a few times but they been *****. even if they agreed to exchange, i don't think i can trust them anymore. so i called canon then they saved mylife.

Ok... .so here is the latest update on this. I took it to the local Canon Authorized Repaire facility and handed it to the tech. He asked what's wrong with it. I tolk him to just open and close the CF door. He did and the camera fired off about five shots. Mind you there is no CF in it and no lens, and the power button was in the OFF position. Then I told him to turn it on... which he did.... at which time the camera began firing like it's life depended on it. He shut the camera off.... and it fired and few more shots then went quite. He calls the other tech out of the back and tells them they need to see this... we go through the whole routine again. Soon the entire staff is laughing at my camera. I asked him is he had ever seen this before for which he replied he had never seen anything like it... and that they were not going to even touch this one... that it would be the express back to mother ship. Which actually in a weird way, made me feel a whole lot better. I hadn't done something stupid, and this is NOT what anyone had seen a 20D ever do before do before. The loved that doing anything like opening the battery door and closing it while the camera was OFF would make it fire. The camera is officially in a Canon techs official report - totally fried. They told me to expect the camera back with new guts - this wasn't anything any tech would spend time trying to fix - it would be a logic board swap out and probably a new shutter. Oh yippie! I just hope the fact that they had this camera in just a few months ago isn't lost on them when they make the bill out. So that is the story as of today.

Oh... and I mentioned to him that I was at about 65K actuations on the camera, and he said that should be a non-issue, that the camera was really rated for 100K actuations - which was the first time I heard anyone with Canon associated with their name quote a number that high. Just a little side bar there.