Happy as a sand boy I was on Friday – I was one of the first people in France to receive a new 5D MkII! However, I wasn’t to remain on the beach for long…
I put the battery on charge as soon as I got home and then later on, once the little one was in bed, I sat down to play with my new toy.
I turned it on and then I started working my way through the manual to see what was new. Auto ISO seemed interesting1, so I switched to aperture priority with Auto ISO and then metered different parts of my living room at different zoom setting. The camera cunningly chose a hand-holdable shutter speed and then increased the ISO appropriately – very nice. I thought I’d take a photo:
Me: Click.
Brand spanking new 5D Mk II: “Err 30 – shooting is not possible”.
What? What’s that? Shooting. Is. Not. Possible.
Panic. Yes, panicking was definitly possible even if shooting wasn’t.
I turned the camera off and on again. Same thing. I took the battery out and then put it back in again. Same thing. I tried different lenses – to no avail. I shot without the compact flash card to make sure that that wasn’t the cause – it wasn’t. I then searched the Internet for “Err 30″ – I couldn’t be the only one surely? It seems that I was.
The Canon USA web site mentions Error 30 (along with 10, 20 and 40) without explaining what it actually means, and simply says to contact Canon. Great help.
Canon France was closed at this time so my wife convinced me to call the USA tech support (I get free calls to the USA, so it wasn’t just a fit of indulgence). To their credit the support was excellent; they were willing to help me despite my European origins and a very helpful and sympathic tech support man walked me through a number of steps to try to reset the camera but in the end it all made no difference.
The camera was, as I had feared, dead.
On Saturday I took it back to my (now shocked) dealer and he’ll send it back to Canon. He assures me that the next 5D Mk II to walk through the shop entrance will be mine, but they’re few and far between so I could be in for a bit of a wait…
Has anyone else seen this problem yet?
- except in manual mode, which I use most of the time… [↩]
I get Err 30 on my 5d2 and no changing out batt or card or off/on makes it go away. When it 1st started Err30 I let it set for a week and then it worked fine for 4-500 shots. Only that once did it ever work again. I googled this and find little other than, nothing helps, or it costs a bunch for Canon to fix it.
Most of the problems I’ve found online happened back about when I bought mine in ’09 but I have just 8000 shots in that time, my main cam is a 1d4. I mostly use the 5d2 when I need really wide fullframe shots with my 14mm2.8 or 15mm fisheye.
Any new knowledge out there on this? s.no. 0220104xxx