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After being released earlier this month, the new Raspberry Pi 2 seems to have some bad reaction to flash photography. RPi2 owners began submitting complaints of the computer system losing power after being exposed to xenon tube flash, or what some users refer to as the "Raspberry PI 2 Xenon Death Flash".

The problem was originally discussed in a thread on raspberrypi.org with the heading, "Why is the PI2 camera-shy?" According to the thread owner, "PeterO," he didn't know what caused the strange phenomenon to happen after taking a couple of snapshots of the device. After taking a picture of it for the third time, he then figured out that the camera flash has something to do with it.

"First two times, I didn't realise what had happened, as I wasn't looking at the screen at the time and only noticed a few minutes afterwards. Third time, I did it just to watch the screen... Instant power off," wrote PeterO.

Raspberry Pi 2 brings a lot of awesome stuff on its release. It enables users to do more than the first Raspberry Pi release. This means, it gets a quad-core CPU, doubled memory, as well as support for Windows 10 platform. The only apparent downside though is that it shuts down after being exposed to flash photography, which is the reason why the phenomenon is dubbed as the "Raspberry PI 2 Xenon Death Flash".

While other RPi2 owners confirmed that they also have the same issue with the main complainant, it seems that it only a handful are affected with the problem. After gathering the details from different members, it was confirmed that this issue lies with all second-generation Raspberry Pi units, and not just on PeterO's. One Raspberry Pi engineer pointed out that the "U16″ chip is light-sensitive, which is the reason why the system shuts down after being exposed to flash.

The good news is that the Raspberry PI 2 Xenon Death Flash doesn't seem to cause permanent damage. However, to avoid the issue from happening while taking pictures of the device, the U16 chip has to be covered first. Future Pi 2 units may be tweaked to prevent the effect of PI2 Xenon Death Flash. In the meantime, the Raspberry Pi Foundation would have to give its official address on the issue.