So this one was a bit of a shock a couple of minutes before I started shooting a wedding. This error just popped up on the screen after popping in a freshly charged battery. The screen went black and a warning message came up that said the camera couldn’t communicate with the battery. I quickly took to the manual, the canon website, websites and forums.

The most sane search results were from the the Canon documents suggesting I remove and reinsert the camera battery. If that didn’t work, it said to reset the camera completely by removing the date/time battery and reinstalling. I even tried my second freshly charged battery. No luck.

The most extreme suggestions on the web related to putting the camera in the freezer for a while and then trying again. Even though the camera would have probably have been fine, I resisted. There is an option to ignore the error and use the battery anyway. It was my only option at the time so I had to go that route. It worked for the wedding even though the battery seemed to drain a bit quicker than normal and didn’t give me an reading on the batteries charge level.

After the weekend and the wedding, I contacted Canon. They said to just send it in and they would fix it under warranty. We’ll see.

While Canon’s customer service was very helpful, this does seem to be a pretty common annoyance with the Canon 7D body. Luckily my camera was under warranty. But if not, you would be out a bit of money for what appears to be a manufacturer defect with the amount of people facing the same issue. Very un-Canon-like indeed.

 

Update – 08/31/2012:

I sent the camera to Canon under warranty and they cited an issue with one of the battery terminals as the cause of the issue (inline with much of what is written on the web), repaired the issue and sent it back. It seems to be functioning flawlessly again. As I said, luckily the camera was still under warranty. While Canon service was extremely helpful, trying to get them to answer the question “Is this a manufacturer defect?” was a no go. They admitted to many of the 7Ds having this issue, but trying to argue for a manufacture defect and getting this repair done for free out of warranty is probably not going to happen.