D200 hot/dead pixels what must I do?

Hi all,

I appologize for binging up this issue again.

I purchased my D200 from a store in the States and my nephew brought it back to me here in South Africa.

I asked the store to check out the camera for banding and pixels problems before giving it to my nephew so they could send it to Nikon to be fixed if need be.

I have found that my D200 has a number of problem pixels 2 deal and seve hot, I used Michael Salzlechner's dead pixel test, exposure was @ 125th of a second at ISO 1600.

I ran the same test last night with the D200 'cold' (just turned on) and used a 1 second exposure @ ISO 1600 and got over 70 problem pixels.

What should I do?

Your feedback would be appreciated.

thanks,
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b zan

Are they even noticeable in real photos? It's pretty common to have some bad pixels in a large CCD. I think I read somewhere that less than 5 near the center was acceptable QC standards.

If you post process your photos like many of us do, I don't think it would be too hard to create a mask and an action in PSCS to automatically eliminate them.

Or you can mail the camera back to the States for service...

Good Luck!
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-Steve
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Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. Ansel Adams

I go along with what Steve has to say. For the very reason of having possible problems, I opted to buy my D200 here in Johannesburg and pay the price premium, for the peace of mind it gives. (If only Nikon had a better international warranty option, it would be great).
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Regards,
Pieter.

Johannesburg.

'Sometimes things aren't what you imagined – They are even better'

I am in a similar situation, I saved R4000 (USD 630 at the time) on the price of the D200 by bringing it in from the USA (I did pay all taxes), and now also have the hot pixel issue.

Mine is not really noticeable with normal exposures, so I am just ignoring it for the time being.

At some point I may just have to pay Nikon SA to map it out.

I just wish that Nikon had a Pixel Mapping option on the camera menu, as all Olympus dSLR's do. That would avoid all of this. For that matter, I wonder what it costs Nikon worldwide to map out pixels under warranty, as it seems to be a fairly common problem with the D200 (never had it on the D70 / D50). May be cheaper to just put it on the camera menu in a firmware upgrade, but I think that Nikon has a mental block about this issue.

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http://www.pbase.com/jola13/bestnature

If only Nikon would listen to it's users and as for their warranty policies, I think it stinks. It virtually forces us to buy the most expensive Nikons in the world.
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Regards,
Pieter.

Johannesburg

'Sometimes things aren't what you imagined – They are even better'

Not only does Nikon only have local warranties on their digital cameras, but dealers in the USA have been requested not to ship to countries outside of the USA.

Try to order a Nikon body from B&H or 17th Street Photo and see what happens. Fortunately there are other vendors in the USA that will still export non grey-market cameras.

It's not that bad with Canon, if you squeeze the dealers locally you can get to a price where it is not worth importing. So all that Nikon SA is managing to achieve is to destroy Nikon as a product in South Africa.

I recently imported a D80, as this was cheaper, but I purchased a 30D locally for about the same price as I could import it for. I'm a dual system user, because the long Nikon telephotos don't have VR and cost too much.

Pieter Jordaan said:

If only Nikon would listen to it's users and as for their warranty
policies, I think it stinks. It virtually forces us to buy the most
expensive Nikons in the world.
--

Click to expand...

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http://www.pbase.com/jola13/bestnature

Thanks for the feedback.

Pieter how have you found your Canon kit compared to Nikon, which do you prefer?

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b zan

I don't know if you use CS2 or not but if you shoot raw and use CS2, you will not see the hot/deal pixels since CS2 maps them out of your images automatically.

I only have Nikon, Jola013 is the guy with both Nikon and Canon.
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Regards,
Pieter.

'Sometimes things aren't what you imagined – They are even better'

I think that they are more similar than people would like to believe, performance wise.

But each of these are quite different, so you have to decide what your requirements are. And how much you want to spend.

For example :
D80 low price, slow, good high iso, 10Mp
30D medium price, fast, very good high iso, only 8Mp
D200 high price, fast, average high iso, 10Mp

As you can see, there is no clear winner, they all involve some compromise. You have to decide what your requirements are.

I have all three, for various complicated reasons. Unbelieveably, I did that to save money, and for some extra functionality (Nikon 500/4 doesn't have VR and is very expensive, price difference between that and Canon 500/4L IS is much more than cost of 30D).

B Zan said:

Thanks for the feedback.

Pieter how have you found your Canon kit compared to Nikon, which
do you prefer?

--
b zan

Click to expand...

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http://www.pbase.com/jola13/bestnature

I've never heard or read anything about CS2 automatically factoring out bad pixels.
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Steve

If you shoot raw and use CS2 to process your RAW files, it will automatically map out the bad pixels. So when you open a raw file in CS2, and after you are done making the raw adjustments, the jpeg that opens up has been removed of the bad pixels.

Yes, I can confirm this worked with my single dead pixel, no idea how it determines this. Wish Capture had an option to do this too...