dell_phinus

"This is one of those common problems that Canon will not recognize. I ran into it by accident myself. If you wear a hat and the flash tries to pop up and cannot and it does that several times it will fail. The next time it tries the camera gives the battery dead signal. This only occurs in idiot mode. The only work around it to use the camera in another mode and pop up the flash manually. Wolf is currently fixing my camera for me and they are covering it, but I will have to be much more careful in the future."

DO you know what failed? Was it the servo/solenoid/whatever type of actuator, or a linkage? Any idea what the cost would be if it was out of warranty?

Mine did the same thing, and I too could work around it by manually opening/closing the flash, but I'm concerned about the LONG TERM reliability of it. My Maxxum lasted 17 years. I'd like my next camera to go that long too, if digital doesn't make it a moot point....

Thanks for the info!

"Nope. Only in the Basic Zone. In the Creative Zone you must make a decision to use flash and then lift it up yourself. In all modes you must push the flash down to retract it. It isn't automatic. Popup flash operation is explained in detail on pages 81-84 of the manual. This misunderstanding may be the source of your problem."

I agree that in the Creatice Zones, you had to manually pop up the flash for main or fill flash. In situations where the camera didn't have enough light to focus, it would pop up the flash, strobe it rapdily until it achieved focus,then pop it down. We were in a heavily treed theme park and it used it ALOT. Then it quit popping up and refused to operate at all, showing the error symbol in the LCD. turning off the auto-focus assist function via CF, and going P mode so it wouldn't try to fill flash restored operation and cleared the error.

Greetings,

I'm in the market for a new camera system, as my Maxxum 7000 has

finally given up the ghost. Looking at the Elan 7; actually had one

for a week, and the on-camera flash quit popping up, which confused

the camera, and it'd give the error symbol and refuse to reset.

Finally figured out that if I popped up the flash manually, it'd think

everything was OK and start working again.

That scared me off, so I returned it, and am toying with an N80 now.

But, I really liked the Elan.

SO, can anyone tell me if this was a fluke, or is there a problem with

the flash servo reliability, since it operates so frequently if

enabled for autofocus assist?

Thanks for any and all advice,

Dell*Phinus

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