A consumer named John Guerriero has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony Electronics Inc. in the Southern District of New York for claiming that the Sony A7 III shutter is not suitable for the purpose, resulting in a much shorter than expected life expectancy. The reported life expectancy of the shutter on the Sony A7 III is 200,000 triggers, although he claims that “several users report shutter failures … between 10,000 and 50,000 for most users who have experienced this”.
If these failures happen outside the one-year warranty, customers will either be required to pay $ 500-650 for the repair or will basically be stuck with a useless brick for the rest of the time. And while the life expectancy of the shutter on any camera is not a guarantee, he claims that it happens so often that it is kind of suspect.
According to the lawsuit, there are signs that her shutter is about to die and she dies in a predictable way.
Before the shutter failure, users report hearing an unusual shutter sound, followed by the screen darkening and displaying the following message: ‘Camera error. Turn it off and on. ‘
– Guerriero v. Sony Electronics Inc., 7: 21-cv-02618, No. 1 (SDNY March 26, 2021)
Although these problems do not solve the problem. The “atypical shutter sound” is always an indicator that something bad is about to happen to your shutter, but Sony’s generic “camera error”. Turn it off and on. ”The error message is extremely generic and appears to be the standard error message for just about anything that can occasionally go wrong with your camera.
Guerriero presented a hypothesis for the cause of the failure, stating that “[w]When a user removes the lens, the shutter is closed and locked. In most cases, the shutter has come loose ”, which is accompanied by several photographs showing the physical failure. He went on to say that “the shutter blade grips the front edge as it moves downward when taking a photo … because the blades are positioned further forward, so they ‘take’ and cannot fully clean”. As for the blades to be further ahead, he postulates that the shutter “is unusually susceptible to breakage by small particles, even dust, which can cause the blades (to be) misaligned”.
Exactly how long after the error starts, a complete failure can be expected is unclear. But if that generic error message starts showing up before your warranty runs out and you hear the Facebook folks saying “Just remove and reinsert your battery, it will be fine” and then it will die completely after your warranty runs out, so you have a big repair bill.
No manufacturer uses the life expectancy of the shutter as a guarantee, but the vague error message that means nothing to most consumers combined with the apparent frequency that the suit suggests that such a failure is happening is definitely something I think should be examined – especially when most manufacturers are extremely conservative in their life expectancy of the shutter. I have three Nikon DSLRs here that are at 2-10x their nominal life expectancy, for example.
You can read the complete costume here.
It will be an interesting case to follow, and I am curious to know how many of our readers have experienced such a failure with the A7 III. Not surprisingly, DIYP is contacted by many photographers and I would have thought that if this were as common a problem as the suit suggests, we would have heard more about it by now.
[via Law Street]