D600 focus issues

26 June 2013

So last year I bought a new Nikon D600 frame, which cost more than any electronic device I have ever bought. I wanted the full blown sensor and full HD video. What I ended up liking the most wast the high ISO and low light sensitivity which allowed me to ditch my flash almost completely.

A mont ago or so I dropped the camera. It was in its bag so at first I thought I got off with a scare. Then when the next time I took a closer look I found that the mirror was hanging halfway all the time and covering half of the sensor. I am travelling a lot now for work so I had to have the camera courier carried to Helsinki (in hindsight I might have been better off by sending it to Stockholm). In Finland there is only one company that does all the service for Nikon and Canon, JAS Tekniikka.

The camera was then in JAS Tekniikka for service for a couple of weeks and they sent the camera back to my place in Finland. I was again in Sweden when the package arrived so my girlfriend forwarded it to me in Gävle. Everything seemed to be ok, I was quite happy snapping some shots of dredgers. Then, yesterday I was taking a picture of some serial numbers and I could not get the camera to focus at a close distance. I was in a hurry so did not think much of it. In the evening we went to have some dinner with my colleagues and I tried snapping a portrait of our secretary. With an aperture of 1.8 I could clearly see that the camera was not focusing correctly, the focus ways way at the back of the target. Trying to focus something at 5 meters would give mee focus at 200 meters. Autofocus and view finder both looked ok but the final picture was totally out of focus. I tried another lens and still I had the same problem.

In D600 you can already fine tune your focus even for individual lenses but now the body was so much out of focus there was absolutely nothing I could do with fine tuning. After experimenting I noticed the Live View is still working and focusing correctly. I called JAS tekniikka and told them the camera had not been serviced correctly and their answer was pretty much “yeah, we don’t take your word for it, send the camera back”. Five minutes later the technician I had been talking to called me back and told me to send all my lenses as well – “Sounds like the body is prefectly adjusted but your lenses are not”. To me that sounds like a bullshit attempt of making me pay for tuning my lenses after they botched up the body.

Anyway, this is what the focus is now like with auto focus and view finder with 50mm 1.8: