Last week I worked on a job that included using the Hasselblad H3D system and digital back.
This choice of digital capture system was based on a special promotion being offered by Hasselblad.
All most immediately we began experiencing problems with the camera during the evenings pre-light.
Since the rental company was closed I called my Hasselblad contact directly and he was kind enough to help us out during his commute home.
Our initial problems seemed to be solved by doing a global reset of the cameras firmware.
We got through the pre-light shooting to CF cards, and decided to get an early start the next day and see if shooting tethered was less problematic.
Almost immediately things went from bad to worse.
Once FlexColor V.4.7.1 was up and running we attached the H3D and instantly received an error message
stating that this version software was incompatible with the current camera firmware: “Do you wish to upgrade”
So we stepped through the firmware upgrade process which involved taking the whole camera apart as directed in the on-screen step by step process.
At the end of this process, which again resets all factory defaults, we were left with a camera that initially didn’t even want to turn on,
and then once turned on it refused to recognize the digital back and the back refused to acknowledge the camera body.
Again another round of problem solving that was resolved by plugging in the firewire from the computer to the camera and firing of 4-6 frames.
This method seemed to wake up both the digital back and the camera and allowed us to shoot to card once again.
Shooting tethered was not an option due to logistics.
As the morning progressed we next experienced problems with the brand new Extreme IV 8 gig CF cards.
after shooting to card , downloading and then reshooting to the same cards a few times the camera stopped writing to the CF card.
At first we thought it was a fluke. we switched out the bad card and added a new one into rotation. Two hours later the same thing.
I reformatted the card on the MAC then brought the card back to the camera and reformatted it two more times in the digital back before trying to shoot again.
This worked for all of 90 minutes when the same CF card produced the same issues.
In using the MAC disk utility I now found that the card had been corrupted and had bad write sectors.
This is what happens to low quality hard drives that over heat over long periods of time.
This is not something that should be happening to a brand new CF card.
We again added another CF card to the rotation and hours later the same result.
In all three different CF cards of sizes all became corrupted.
Calls to Hasselblad and teh rental company revealed that this is becoming a known issue impart due to the release of FlexColor 4.7.1 and the firmware upgrade.
