Odd experience with Fuji support/repair

[Khoji]

I’d been having some problems with my XT-3: While shooting in autofocus mode the display would suddenly and spontaneously zoom in as it does for fine focusing in manual focusing mode. It would then stay zoomed in, making it impossible to frame a shot. Sometimes I could get it to reset by pushing random buttons, but in many cases the only way to reset it would be to shut down, remove the battery and re-insert the battery. Conversely, the zooming in for fine focusing didn’t work in manual focusing mode, which made manual focusing very difficult. At the same time, autofocus would occasionally stop working completely, and when I switched to manual focus it either wouldn’t work at all or would be so sluggish that it would be impossible to work fast enough. Finally, autofocus with face and eye tracking enabled would often go very haywire, with the focus point suddenly drifting off on its own into a dark portion of the image where there was nothing to focus on. When this happened it wasn’t possible to regain control over the focus point with the joystick (and yes, I also pressed the stick to activate it). Here too, I had to turn the camera off and back on again to get focusing to work again properly. Turning off eye tracking and leaving only face tracking on seemed to help a bit.

I wrote to Fuji support about all this and got a prompt and helpful answer, saying that they weren’t aware of these problems and that I should send in the camera and the main affected lens (50-140 2.8) for checking. A few days later I got both of them back with a brief letter saying the following:

• There is nothing wrong with the camera or the lens, everything is normal
• The zoom-in in the display is a normal focusing aid in manual focusing mode

Despite this, everything now appears to be working normally again. I say “appears”, because I haven’t been able to test extensively yet, but zooming for manual focusing now is working correctly (it wasn’t before, no matter whether the function was turned on or off) and I haven’t been able to reproduce the other problems again either. 

The second point in the letter is obviously wrong, because it has nothing to do with the actual problem I was having. As I explained to Fuji, the zoom-in didn’t happen in manual focusing mode, where it should have, and did suddenly happen while autofocusing, after which it wasn’t possible to disable it again. 

My guess is that they did a full factory reset of the firmware in the camera and that this fixed things. Even so, I find it a little strange that they didn’t simply say this, and instead just provided what was probably a boilerplate letter saying that nothing was wrong with the camera.

Has anyone else had experiences like this?