suprised the company took that back since the problem is user not equipment.
I am rather surprised by your comment if it is a serious one, not made in jest. For many years I surpervised a laboratory that developed CCD cameras from scratch. We made the mask designs, had the wafers fabricated, diced the wafers, thinned the chips, and packaged them. We custom-built the electronics for the reading out the devices and processing the images so as to get minimum noise. The banding noise exhibited by this camera is NOT user-generated. In fact, I don't think the typical user would know how to generate this kind of noise in an image from this camera without an enormous amount of work. We have seen this kind of noise in our lab, and it is always considered to be a fault, usually of the electronics. It should not be there. We always eliminate it. The only noise should be random noise of photon sampling, read noise, and dark current.
To be sure, whether this banding noise is a problem for the user or merely a technical feature of no practical importance is up to each user. Clearly some users of the camera find the fault more than an interesting technical curiosity- it degrades their images in ways that bother them. You can't argue with them. They are the ones who are bothered. Others either don't see the banding because of how they handle their images or perhaps their particualr camera doesn't have it. Fine. Good for them! They are happy. But they really can't fault someone who finds this banding-fault a problem- and it is a camera fault, not a user fault- for their photography. Maybe you don't approve of how they take or process pictures, but that is none or your or anyone else's business. This is a fixable fault, and it should be fixed. My 450D had banding, and it degraded my normally-exposed images. My 550D so far has not shown any banding, and I like its images far better in part because of that.
Joe
