Thu Aug 05, 2021 11:00 pm
Hello guys !
I'm quite disheartened. The other day, I had a two day shoot for a japanese sake web commercial that I planned to shoot with my (beloved ?) BMPCC4K. The day before the shoot I tested all my camera gear of course. Everything in working order.
As I barely arrived at the shooting location the first morning, my assistant and I rigged my BMPCC4K and turned it on. A few seconds after that, the touch screen started to act on its own, completely crazy, just like there were ghost fingers touching all over the place. Or actually always at the same places causing zoom in the picture and formating menu poping as well. And then the iso also went bonkers.
I tried to power off the camera, to plug it to external power, to remove the card, the battery, everything. Nothing worked. What an adrenaline rush when you're supposed to shoot in the next minutes or so. Luckily my assistant had his own camera with him (just in case, wasn't suppose to have one). We shot with it the first morning. I went to my place during lunch break to get another camera of mine and finished the commercial with my A7S III... (I also tried to update to the latest firmware the P4K and it kept acting crazy in the same manner)
Anyway, my camera is having the exact same problem depicted in the messages above. I haven't used it much since I bought it. I think I got one of the first, if not the first camera in France, 3 years ago. The camera is in pristine condition. I only experienced a few bugs with it, one being the touch screen not responding well when the camera was on for a certain amount of time. But I just had to reboot the camera and everything was fine.
The thing is, my camera is no longer under warranty (two years in Europe). I know Blackmagic changed the touch screen on their following production batch for the P4K. My camera is useless now without the touch screen. It doesn't come from wear or misuse. Again, it's in perfect shape. I shot very few jobs with it. I know we have a thing here that extends the warranty when there's what we call a "vice caché" like a hidden defect. Before entering any tedious process (about the vice caché), I just wanted to get maybe a blackmagic employee feedback here. Or maybe a user who managed to fix this very issue. I clearly got a lemon, as a camera is not supposed to stop working all of a sudden with not even 50 hours of usage.
Thanks in advance for your insights !