Canon5Dtips Photography is more than words.
The issue
At first, I thought it was dust. Dust on the sensor or on the lens. Then, after watching every single video I shot since I got the camera, I saw something worst than the black dot problem: hot pixels! And to make things worst, there are 2 of them!
I did not notice them at first because most of my shots were done in bright light but last weekend I had to shoot some video for the CD launch of my friend Jon Davis (f1.4 ISO3200, hence the noise…) and the white dots on the dark background cant be missed.
As acknowledged by the production company, this is a rare but not unknown issue. But it seems like there is some confusion between people having serious noise issues while taking long low light pictures (a problem I am not having) and the problem I am having with videos. My problem is not noise, it really is white (hot) pixels. Take a look at the screen capture:
You can see a 100% crop of the problematic area here:
While it is not very noticeable on still images, as soon as the camera starts panning it jumps off the screen and destroy the whole scene. You can see it in the home made clip I did last week too.
What I have tried so far
First, I used the manual auto-cleaning feature about 10 times in a row to see if it could “unstuck” the pixel without success. Then I updated the firmware to 1.07 and they are still there.
My last resort was to call the store. They were very helpful. I will have to bring my camera back Friday and they will see if they can trade mine for a new one straight or, at worst, send it for repair (urck!). If they send it for repair I will try to get an “equivalent” camera until I have my replacement. By equivalent I am of course thinking about these Hasselblad that no body ever rents!
I will report back on this Friday.
