Could a wired remote control mess up my a7r3 camera?

[mistylight925]

I have a Sony a7r3. I recently purchased a wired remote control (a Kiwifotos Remote Control Shutter Release) so I could eliminate as much camera-shake  as possible in my (dark) studio. I photographed still lifes for two days, and I always had the Focus Area set to Flexible Spot. Today I got out of the studio with my camera and was shooting in a park.  I had Focus Area set to Center. To my amazement and consternation, the Center focus area almost immediately changed to Flexible Spot.  I checked my settings and Focus Area was still set to Center. I found that no matter what focus area I set and no matter what mode I was in, I would start with the correct focus area and it would soon change to a Flexible Spot that always appeared in the upper left corner. (Sometimes this was accompanied by a message about focus being cancelled.) Turning the camera off and on had no effect. After an hour of trying one thing after another to no avail, I reformatted the camera back to factory settings. This seems to have solved the problem, but of course I have lost all the customizations I spent many many hours inputting. My question is, could the wired remote control have caused this weird behavior? I would have said no two days ago but it seems like such an odd coincidence that I used flexible spot exclusively with a remote control for two days and after that, flexible spot kept dominating all other Focus Area settings. 

[DenverSteve]

Easy answer, yes. Any accessory, especially an aftermarket product can create anomalies that weren't there previously.  It could have been a one-time incident occurring when you plugged in, or unplugged your release.  The only way to know would be to use it again and see if it repeats the occurrence. 

I would have done exactly what you did (reset camera settings to factory) and reinstall my preferred settings. To make this quicker in the future, you can save your preferred settings to a SD card so that future resets are performed almost instantly. 

Edited March 28, 2023 by DenverSteve

[mistylight925]

Thank you for your reply, DenverSteve. I really wasn't sure that a remote control could create anomalies.

I would be more relaxed about my camera acting strangely (whatever the cause) if I could in fact save my preferred settings and re-load them when I had to reinitialize my camera. But that's not possible with the Sony A7R3. Sony introduced that capability on the A7R4. 

[Monochrome]

You can save memory settings on camera bodies older than the a7r4. Sony just does not make it easy. You need basic computer knowledge on how to copy and paste files with a computer to copy the correct 4 files on the SD card to the computer and then copy and paste those same 4 files to the correct location on a Sony formated SD card.

Sony's website covers the basics of what 4 files to copy and paste at:

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00203863