Outdoor overexposures

[The Kiwi]

I took a pocket camera to the Chester Nimitz Museum complex in Fredricksburg a month ago wearing a T-shirt with no pocket, and got tired of having to either dig the A1200 out of its case, or have it dangling inconveniently from my wrist, so I started looking for alternatives, which seemed to take me way beyond my budgetary limit. Eventually, I decided to see what I might find in a Canon "G" series, and got a G6 for almost nothing via eBay, but I fear it may be worth less than what I paid, after all.

Outdoors, in sun or shade, on auto, it overexposes severely. I think something in it is failing.

Bargains, we usually find, aren't quite what we hope.

I have gotten so (photographically) lazy that I haven't tried setting things manually to see what happens that way.

[Legion]

Obvious question, but someone hasn't been fiddling with the exposure compensation settings by any chance?

[The Kiwi]

Not obvious to me. If a simpler type digital, or a much older, film era camera had included such settings, I might recognize the term, but my digital camera experience has been limited to a Minolta 2300, Canon A 530, and now the Powershot A1200, and I don't think I've run across that one on any of them.

I did get a printed Camera User Guide, but it has no subject index in it. Now that I have the NAME of the setting, on page 94, it directs me to an "Omni Selector", which I haven't had previous reason to mess with . .

I'll check to see if it's on zero.

[The Kiwi]

Not obvious to me. If a simpler type digital, or a much older, film era camera had included such settings, I might recognize the term, but my digital camera experience has been limited to a Minolta 2300, Canon A 530, and now the Powershot A1200, and I don't think I've run across that one on any of them.

I did get a printed Camera User Guide, but it has no subject index in it. Now that I have the NAME of the setting, on page 94, it directs me to an "Omni Selector", which I haven't had previous reason to mess with . .

I'll check to see if it's on zero.

That setting is still square in the middle of the range, so the constant overexposures have to be something else.

[Legion]

What is your ISO set to?

[The Kiwi]

The system wouldn't let me access that until I set the dial from Auto to P(rogram), and it was set to 400. I reset it as "Auto" for further testing.

[The Kiwi]

The former owner must have regularly used his own manual settings, without having returned the ISO to a more ordinary setting before buying a newer camera and forgetting about the setting.

Nevertheless, it doesn't seem LOGICAL for the setting to have affected what the camera is supposed to do running at Auto. If that's going to be my only problem, then there's a lot to like about this model, in spite of its age.

[Legion]

400 shouldn't cause too many problems with over exposure outdoors. I was wondering if it was set to 1600 or something, and that was putting the exposure beyond what the maximum shutter speed could cope with, or something like that.

Hmmm....