Does anyone know of a D5100 Auto Focus issues?

My new D5100 will not auto focus.

Several weeks ago I used it for one photo-shoot in RAW setting for about 25 images and everything worked fine. Then yesterday I needed to shoot some more images and no matter what settings I used, it will not auto focus. Even on manual focus, light colored objects came out fuzzy while darker colored objects came out sharp. I'm really confused.

I took the camera to someone more experienced than I am (he has several high-end Nikons) and he couldn't get it to auto focus either.

Before I go to Nikon and the warranty (being a newbie) I was wondering if anyone knew of a problem. My camera is barely 2 months old with very light use.

Thanks for any input anyone can offer.

A Black

Here are a couple of screen shots

Welcome to the forum

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We need some details. Which lens are you using? If you have another lens have you tried it? Being a newbie I have to ask, do you have it set to A on the lens?

Do all the standard things like resetting all the settings back to factory. Take the lens off and make sure the contacts are clean.

Post a picture and if you can read the data we might be able to help you more.

Hi Moderator Don, thanks for the welcome and instructions.

My Lens is what came with the camera, AF-S DX 18-55/3.5-5.5.6G VR, I have no other lens. The A setting was left over from having tried every setting I could think of to get the auto focus to work. And having the top dial turned to A.

If "Reset shooting menu" is the same as resetting "settings back to factory" I have done that more times than I like to think of, which hasn't helped. Up until now I haven't removed the lens to clean the contacts because I'm paranoid about dust, but just did that to see if it could be that, which it wasn't, no change.

I'd be happy to post a picture. Can you tell me what would be helpful? I assume you aren't talking about me just posting a blurry image. I'd be happy to do anything you felt would be helpful before contacting Nikon. I'm sure I sound like an idiot; I'm at the top of my field, but at the bottom of camera knowledge. The DVD manual was unhelpful once I got past the setup stage as far as troubleshooting this problem.

A Black

There is a switch on the lens its self. I do not mean to insult your intelligence but I have to ask. The switch on the that says A/M make sure it is on A. Switch it back and forth and back to A.

Also if you do switch it to M and you turn the lens to manually focus does it focus then?

Also make sure you are focusing in bright light and a subject that has lots of contrast.

The switch on the top that says A is for Automatic and does not have anything to do with focus.

Posting a picture sometimes keeps the EXIF data that is imbedded and with that I can see what all the settings of the camera are. Even blurry.\

If you are on Facebook you can friend me there and through the Chat feature we can do this faster.

I'm not offended thanks. Yes I have switched it back and forth. I tried to use the camera in the manual focus mode and found that on light colored objects it is fuzzy even when it looks at its best focus in the view finder but if the object is dark the images come out sharp. That happened even though I shoot everything from the same distance and the objects were stationary. Example images below:




I reduced the size of these images from 300-DPI to 72-DPI assuming that large images would not be postable but looking at your post I'm not sure that this was the correct thing to do if you were looking for imbedded data. Will this forum take images that are 2MB? But you can see the light images are fuzzy and the dark ones aren't. This was the same for a whole series of like images.

AB

I would do some tests making sure lens and camera set to auto focus, single focus point in AF-A mode. Make sure to are shooting past the minimum focus distance of the lens and swap out the same subjects. Shoot perpendicular to the boxes and make sure you have plenty of light and use the flash. Might want to make sure the focus assist lamp is on if shooting indoors.

ABlack said:

I'm not offended thanks. Yes I have switched it back and forth. I tried to use the camera in the manual focus mode and found that on light colored objects it is fuzzy even when it looks at its best focus in the view finder but if the object is dark the images come out sharp. That happened even though I shoot everything from the same distance and the objects were stationary. Example images below:


View attachment 34439View attachment 34440

I reduced the size of these images from 300-DPI to 72-DPI assuming that large images would not be postable but looking at your post I'm not sure that this was the correct thing to do if you were looking for imbedded data. Will this forum take images that are 2MB? But you can see the light images are fuzzy and the dark ones aren't. This was the same for a whole series of like images.

AB

Click to expand...

Try to keep images under 1mb. I generally reduce the size to 1000px on the long size and that generally works while keeping the quality pretty good.

If you are manually focusing there should be no difference in focus from dark to light subjects.

There is a small adjusting knob on the side of the eye piece that adjusts the focus of the viewfinder that helps to be sharp but makes not difference in the shot though. Just the view.
If this is manual focus then I would say that you did not focus it correctly. Have you tried live view?

Also what size are you shooting? You should be shooting JPEG Fine and Large. This will give you the best shot out of the camera. I don't think you are ready for RAW yet. It takes a lot of Post Processing to get that correct.

There are also some sharpening settings in the camera that we can go over later.

What aperture and shutter speed were these shot at? You may be trying these shots in to low of light.

Hi All

Since I bought the camera to do product shots on auto focus I would like to get back to the original question. Has anyone heard of any problems with the D5100 auto focus? It should be the simplest setting, the camera should auto focus without too much knowledge about aperture and shutter speed, shouldn't it?

Just to check, I did take the camera outside in ample light but with the same result. It appears that no matter what setting I use or what light I am in, the camera won't auto focus.

Then you just need to send it in for repair


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