SOMETHING WEIRD

  While on travel this past weekend I had something totally weird and unexpected happen with my Sony DSC-RX100.  I thought I'd pass the incident along in case you run into a similar situation.

  I had been using the camera frequently during the day but had put it aside for a couple of hours while attending to something else.  When I started it up everything looked normal but when I tried to take a photo by pressing the shutter release button, basically nothing happened.  No focus bars and no photo being taken.  I tried switching photo modes with basically the same result.  After some tries a photo was finally taken but it was while I was moving the camera around, not when I was actually trying to take a photo.

  I switched to the video mode and it seemed to respond correctly in that mode to video commands.

  I switched back to the photo modes with the same non-picture-taking result.

  It wasn't convenient to troubleshoot the camera in the situation at hand so I put the camera away until I was back in the hotel room.

  I first tried something that I'd seen on YouTube soon after the RX100 was released.  This person had his RX100 lockup.  When he took it back to his dealer he was told to remove the battery for awhile.  He did and it solved his problem.  Unfortunately, removing and replacing the battery didn't fix my problem.

  So...I looked in the RX100 Cybershot User Guide.  I did a search on "reset" and although I found that the camera doesn't have a reset button like many Sony cameras have, it did have a three levels of initializing user settings.  "Custom reset" resets only custom settings; "Rec mode reset" resets only major shooting settings to the default values; and "Reset Default" which resets a settings to default settings.

  I tried the first level - Custom reset - first without success.  I then decided to go all the way with the Reset Default level.  This level apparently not only resets manually input settings to their default values, it actually reloads the camera's firmware.  Whatever it does fixed my problem - yippee!  

  I guess the lesson here is that as our cameras get more complex and more controlled by software than hardware, they may occasionally have the problems that our computers have.  Thankfully, the reset I did worked.  

  If you've anything similar to this I'd like to hear about it.