Sunday, January 29, 2012

Problems with Solmeta GPS N1 for D7000

It has been eight months since I last used the Solmeta GPS N1 unit.  I thought I did something wrong back then, but I don't think so now.  The unit is fairly simple to use.  You just plug in the provided USB cable and power on the GPS unit to start receiving GPS signals.  In my test last night, I did not even power on the GPS unit and yet, after a few shots, three things failed to work on my D7000:

  1. Half-pressing the shutter button to focus actually triggers the shutter.
  2. Sometimes, the shutter release button stops working.
  3. The Play button to review photos taken stops working.
  4. The Menu button stops working.
The only way to restore functionality to the D7000 is to disconnect the USB cable.

Having observed the behaviour of the SB-25 flash gun when it is triggered with a PC Sync cable, I have a feeling that some wires inside the Solmeta unit get shorted (to activate the camera shutter) and not released.  To trigger the SB-25 flash gun to fire off, the two wires of the PC Sync cable just need to be connected together.  The SB-25 flash gun will fire off once.  If the two wires stay connected together, the flash gun will freeze up, i.e. the menu and function buttons will stop working.  A very similar behaviour is noticed here with the D7000 and the Solmeta unit.  I wonder if the trigger wires got shorted and not released, electronically.

I should have done this test last July when I bought the unit.  Well, it is still under warranty so I just e-mailed service[at]solmeta.com for support.  Let's see what they say.
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2 comments:

  1. fotonFebruary 4, 2012 at 10:48 AM

    It has been a week since I e-mailed Solmeta. No response. Not even an automated e-mail. This is poor customer service.

    Now, having said that, I should mention that I did retry using the Solmeta last weekend. I made sure that the GPS plug was fully inserted, really well. Everything seemed to work fine. The problems I noticed earlier went away.

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  2. fotonMarch 3, 2012 at 7:54 AM

    I'm so close to saying that Solmeta sucks at customer service (regardless of whether the product works or not.) They have yet to respond to my e-mail enquiry. It's been a month now. I almost want to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe my e-mail got lost in cyberspace, and give them another chance to reply before saying they suck....

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