sean_harding

<p>Ok, so I did the shutter cleaning procedure described above. I got a tiny bit of black off, but nowhere near the amount shown in the tutorials, so I'm not convinced that was the problem. I also threw together a quick and dirty Arduino-based shutter speed tester. I went through all of the shutter speeds and fired them off several times. There was definitely more variation than I'd like to see. However, I would have expected a pattern of much-too-short exposures if that was the cause, and I didn't see that. It's possible something different is happening when the door is shut and the lens is on. Or it's just so intermittent that I didn't trigger it.</p> <p>Anyway, at this point, I think I'm going to run one more roll through it just to see if the cleaning magically fixed it, but I'm basically declaring it unfixable and going eBay shopping. Maybe I'll step up to a 1N or 1V while I'm at it...</p> <p>Thanks for the brainstorming and indulging my not entirely rational urge to fix this!</p>

<p>Heh. Yes, I know. Believe me, I've spent a fair amount of time looking at cameras on eBay this week. But I enjoy fixing stuff, so I want to at least give it a shot.</p>

<p>So, no visible evidence of goo on the shutter, but I suppose I'll try the cleaning trick anyway. I don't have any lighter fluid on hand, so I'll probably have to report back in a few days once I've obtained some. From the lens side, I do see what I might describe as a light "scuff" on the shutter, which seems kind of suspicious. Not sure if it's remnants of a cleaning attempt from before I got the camera (I definitely have never tried cleaning the shutter since I've had it) or what.</p>

<p>Hmm, interesting. I'll check that out when I get home tonight. The frames that came out were mostly correctly exposed. Skewed a little bit toward underexposed, but probably within the expected range.</p>

<p>Hi all. I'm curious if anyone has some ideas about the best way to troubleshoot exposure issues with an EOS-1 (original model, film body). I pulled mine out of storage recently (you may have seen my other recent post about the rear dial being flaky). I ran a roll of slide film through it, and simultaneously ran a roll through an old Nikon I'd also pulled out. I shot the same photos on each camera, frame by frame. I shot in manual exposure mode with spot metering. All outdoors, with no flash. Nothing fancy. I wasn't <strong>super </strong>careful with my metering (and I'm probably a bit rusty), but I also wasn't completely haphazard.</p> <p>The Nikon roll came back fine. Some shots were a bit under or over exposed, but in general it looked good. On the Canon roll, about 75% of the frames are completely black. Not just underexposed, but unexposed (or so underexposed that literally nothing is visible). It was intermittent throughout the roll, so it's not as if it just stopped working at some point (or stopped advancing the film or something like that).</p> <p>Off the top of my head, I can think of these possibilities:</p> <ol> <li>The shutter isn't firing, or is open for much less time than it should be.</li> <li>The mirror isn't getting out of the way.</li> <li>The aperture is closing all the way down even when it shouldn't be.</li> <li>The metering is completely off, leading me to choose incorrect exposures.</li> <li>The DX code on the film was read incorrectly, leading me to choose incorrect exposures.</li> </ol> <p>I fired off a bunch of shots with the back open, and the shutter and mirror visually appear to be operating properly. Obviously I can't tell if the shutter speed is correct, but I can tell that it gets faster and slower as I adjust the setting. And the long exposure times (the ones I can count off in my head) seem about right.</p> <p>Similarly, I fired a bunch of shots staring at the lens, and the aperture seems to be closing the right amount for whatever setting I put it on (again, visually, it changes proportionally with the setting).</p> <p>It's somewhat possible the metering is off. As I was shooting with the two cameras, I wasn't really closely comparing the exposures they came up with. But if it was way off, I thought I would have noticed. Maybe not (sad how reliant I've gotten on instant feedback with digital). However, I walked around now with that camera and a DSLR which has a known good meter, and they consistently came up with the same exposures (or close enough).</p> <p>I put a few empty rolls in the camera, and the DX codes were all read properly.</p> <p>So, I'm kind of stumped. It's possible there's an intermittent problem of some sort. Or maybe one of the things I visually inspected doesn't actually work as well as it looks like it does. Or something different happens when the back is shut. Maybe whatever is causing the rear dial to work intermittently is causing this problem too. But I'm not really sure how to efficiently move forward to narrow it down at this point. It's going to quickly get expensive and time consuming to keep running rolls of film through to test it. Maybe it's time to just go hunting on eBay for a "new" one :-p</p> <p>Any suggestions? Have any of you seen a similar problem with this body?</p>

<p>I have an OLD EOS-1 body that I haven't used in a long, long, LONG time. I pulled it out to play with it last weekend, and I'm having a problem where sometimes the rear dial doesn't work (in manual mode for adjusting aperture). I'm not sure if there's some quirk of the camera I'm forgetting about or if something is broken (no, it's not that I'm failing to flip the switch to enable the dial).<br> It seems inconsistent and random. When I first turned it on, the dial didn't seem to work at all. I messed with it for probably 5 minutes, flipped the switch back and forth, etc., and nothing. Then I half pressed the shutter to focus, and suddenly the dial started working. I thought maybe it was something like it's not communicating with the lens until the first time I try to focus or something (seems weird, but who knows). But then a bit later, I switched the dial off and back on again, and it wouldn't work. After a bunch of fiddling (basically turning the wheel, pressing on it, switching the switch back and forth, etc.), it started working again. But I have no idea what I did to make it work, or how to reproduce it next time.<br> Has anyone experienced this before? Any suggestions on how to maybe make it a little bit less flaky? I don't really want to spend the money for professional repair on this camera (I think I paid around $200 for it well over 10 years ago), but I'm open to DIY fixes. Or, I'll just live with it.....</p>