D7200 unwanted multiple exposure

FrankInPhilly

New member
I'm going to call Nikon tech support about this tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'd be interested to see if others have experienced this problem.

This morning I shot 30-35 pictures using:
Nikon D7200 body
Nikon 18-200 DX lens
SanDisk 64GB 48MB/s card
P (programmed) mode
Single shot - not burst - mode
Output JPEG only

I've had the lens for years. Ditto the card. It's the body that's new. I've had it for a couple of months, have taken at least 1000+ frames with no issues (other than what I'm going to describe below, I've been really, really pleased with it).

About a dozen of the pictures were overlaid (that is, it looked like I deliberately used the "Multiple Exposure" setting. Some looked like double exposures, a few, triple. What I could make out of each exposure "layer" was that if it were a standalone picture, it would have been good.

I can't see the pattern in these malformed images: I didn't shoot quickly (buffering issues); there were no error indicators on the screen; the shooting conditions weren't problematic (just street scenes with nice morning light). There was nothing to indicate anything had gone wrong.

I thought it somehow might have been an issue with the playback, but when I transferred the images to my phone, that was ruled out - they were FUBAR when view there, too.

I've shot many thousands of frames with my D90 and now with the D7200 and have NEVER experienced anything like this. So my question is simply: has anyone else experienced this, and if so, how was it resolved?
 
First off welcome to the forum. I would suggest a full factory reset to make sure you did not accidently change some setting that might be causing this.

Nikon D7200 Factory Reset: Restoring the Nikon D7200 to its default settings, just hold down the [ISO button] button and the [+/- Exposure Compensation button] together, until the control panel turns off briefly while the camera resets itself to the factory default settings
 

nickt

Senior Member
There is nothing mechanical that could do this like back in the film days. Hopefully the reset clears it.
Were you messing with U1 and U2? Things hide in those U's because they save pretty much everything that was going on when you hit save. The U's don't reset with the 2 button reset, separate menu item for them.
 

Bikerbrent

Senior Member
Welcome aboard. Enjoy the ride.

Did you re-format your memory card in the D7200. If it was last formatted in the D90, then moved to the D7200, this might be an issue.
 

pforsell

Senior Member
I'm going to call Nikon tech support about this tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'd be interested to see if others have experienced this problem.

This morning I shot 30-35 pictures using:
Nikon D7200 body
Nikon 18-200 DX lens
SanDisk 64GB 48MB/s card
P (programmed) mode
Single shot - not burst - mode
Output JPEG only

I've had the lens for years. Ditto the card. It's the body that's new. I've had it for a couple of months, have taken at least 1000+ frames with no issues (other than what I'm going to describe below, I've been really, really pleased with it).

About a dozen of the pictures were overlaid (that is, it looked like I deliberately used the "Multiple Exposure" setting. Some looked like double exposures, a few, triple. What I could make out of each exposure "layer" was that if it were a standalone picture, it would have been good.

I can't see the pattern in these malformed images: I didn't shoot quickly (buffering issues); there were no error indicators on the screen; the shooting conditions weren't problematic (just street scenes with nice morning light). There was nothing to indicate anything had gone wrong.

I thought it somehow might have been an issue with the playback, but when I transferred the images to my phone, that was ruled out - they were FUBAR when view there, too.

I've shot many thousands of frames with my D90 and now with the D7200 and have NEVER experienced anything like this. So my question is simply: has anyone else experienced this, and if so, how was it resolved?


I'm not familiar with D7200, but I guess it has a HDR mode that is separate from the multiple exposure mode. I think it is worth it to check that the HDR mode is off. Other than that, it needs service.
 

FrankInPhilly

New member
Nikon tech support asked if I had bracketing turned on (I didn't), whether I had formatted my SD card (I hadn't). They've heard of this problem with earlier models but not the D7200, probably because it's fairly new. In those cases, as with mine, the recommendation was to do a factory reset and use a new (or reformatted) SD card. After doing that, I didn't see any more of the unwanted multiple exposures, but since it was a transient and non-replicable problem, that really doesn't make me feel comforted. Tech support said if the problem occurred again I'd have to send them the body. So, fingers crossed it doesn't come to that, and I'm going to review each frame as I take them (at least for a while - that's a hard habit to develop!).
Thank you all for your suggestions!
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
When I moved from the D90 to the D7200 I *didn't* reformat the card. But today I *did* reformat, using the camera to do it.
That should resolve the issue. Each camera needs its *own* folder structure on the card it's writing its images to and in-camera "reformatting" is what creates that folder structure.
...
 

pforsell

Senior Member
The manufacturers recommend reformatting the cards every time they are inserted into the camera. Probably to reduce the number of support calls? I've found that the cards and the camera firmware are much more robust than the manufacturers dare to give them credit for. I haven't formatted a card in years, and I have 50+ CF cards ranging between 128MB to 128GB and haven't had a glitch in at least three quarters of a million images and two dozen cameras in 18 years.

I always put the card in a card reader and I use a script that copies the files to two different places in my computer, and erases the files from the card, all in one go. If the camera firmware was so buggy or the cards so fragile, that they couldn't sustain this kind of use, I'm sure I would have found out.

The memory card is just a like a thumb drive and I don't format a thumb drive after every use either. But still, the manufacturers' recommendations are there and I don't know of any reason to not follow them.

Just sayin' that the sky doesn't fall even if one doesn't format before every use. :)
 
Top