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5D II with many hot pixels - still a risk buying a new copy?

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Picturenaut

Picturenaut

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I mainly shoot with a 7D, mostly wildlife with long teles + macro, it's my workhorse. But I think about getting a 5D II as a second body for landscape photog as I often cross great landscapes on my tours. A wonderful Xmas gift from my wife, a Zeiss 18 mm/3.5 lens, makes me even more thinking about an FF body to make full use of it. But I still read and hear a lot about the famous hot pixel issue of many 5D II copies around, even recent ones. So I am not sure how high the risk is to get a bad copy.

How's your experience with your 5D II? Please share it with me...

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Picturenaut
 
Yes, everyone writes a lot about their hot pixels. It's an enormous problem on all 5DmkII bodies. I crop the parts out, on my 5DmkII there are not many hot pixels on the left under side of the sensor so I place my subject there and crop the picture. Still have enough left for web usage and more! I think all users do this so if you are prepared to crop the pictures it's not a big problem. You still got that magical FF quality so it's worth it.
Picturenaut said:
I mainly shoot with a 7D, mostly wildlife with long teles + macro, it's my workhorse. But I think about getting a 5D II as a second body for landscape photog as I often cross great landscapes on my tours. A wonderful Xmas gift from my wife, a Zeiss 18 mm/3.5 lens, makes me even more thinking about an FF body to make full use of it. But I still read and hear a lot about the famous hot pixel issue of many 5D II copies around, even recent ones. So I am not sure how high the risk is to get a bad copy.

How's your experience with your 5D II? Please share it with me...

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Picturenaut
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fun; http://www.x32.nl
work; http://www.ministerievanbeeld.nl
 
I own and use two 5DII cameras professionally. No hot pixels. Phenomenal image quality and an absolutely amazing landscape camera.















 
LOL!

To the OP, the 5D2 does not have a hot pixel problem. You may be thinking about the early production black dot issue, which was solved by a firmware soon after its release, some 3 years ago:

" Early buyers of the camera reported black pixels appearing in high contrast situations.[28] In late 2008, Canon officially acknowledged that there was an issue with black dots and vertical banding noise in certain circumstances.[29] On January 7, 2009, Canon released firmware update 1.0.7 to address these two problems. " (ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_5D_Mark_II ).

In other words, there is nothing to worry about. Regards.
hunk said:
Yes, everyone writes a lot about their hot pixels. It's an enormous problem on all 5DmkII bodies. I crop the parts out, on my 5DmkII there are not many hot pixels on the left under side of the sensor so I place my subject there and crop the picture. Still have enough left for web usage and more! I think all users do this so if you are prepared to crop the pictures it's not a big problem. You still got that magical FF quality so it's worth it.
Click to expand...
 
LOL. no hot pixel issues at all.

To be honest, I had a 5d2 the first week it came out. on this one I had a cluster of hot pixels which showed only on video.

LR would remove the hot pixels and I lived with it like this for almost a year since I never used video.

Then I just sent it to canon and they replaced the sensor.

since then I got a 2nd 5d2 few months ago and no problem at all...

This is a great camera!!
 
Wow, great pictures, congrats! Quite convincing.
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Picturenaut
 
Thanks to all for your helpful comments. The reason why I opened this thread is that a good German photog website (Canon guys!) just recently published a test with two different 5D II bodies and one of them showed heavy clusters of hot pixels (RED dots, not black ones, see http://www.traumflieger.de/desktop/5Dmk2/EOS_5D_MarkII_hotpixelproblem.php and scroll a bit down). They received a lot of comments by frustrated 5D II users with the same problem, at least because you can't map it out doing vids. Fortunately, I prefer stills photog so that's no real issue for me.
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Picturenaut
 
When ten people write about a problem it can be that, a real problem. But when it's about a camera from which > 100.000 are sold... a camera that's been on the market for years...

The 5DmkII has a few cons
  • AF is very good, but the OUSIDE points are pretty bad
  • Banding is bad if you uplift the shadows much in postproduction
  • Not very pro in having 1 memory card, mediocre weathersealing and such
The rest of the problems mentioned in fora are exaggerated or just not happening much. Sometimes the mirror gets loose, a knob might turn, a door might crack but these things occur seldom. In fact, the mkII is the best bang for buck just as much now as it was for a few years ago.
Picturenaut said:
Thanks to all for your helpful comments. The reason why I opened this thread is that a good German photog website (Canon guys!) just recently published a test with two different 5D II bodies and one of them showed heavy clusters of hot pixels (RED dots, not black ones, see http://www.traumflieger.de/desktop/5Dmk2/EOS_5D_MarkII_hotpixelproblem.php and scroll a bit down). They received a lot of comments by frustrated 5D II users with the same problem, at least because you can't map it out doing vids. Fortunately, I prefer stills photog so that's no real issue for me.
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Picturenaut
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fun; http://www.x32.nl
work; http://www.ministerievanbeeld.nl
 
Thanks! Love to show off my latest vacation pics.
 
I got my 5DMII two weeks ago. There are about 4-6 hot pixels. I sent it back to B&H for exchange and hope to get a hot pixel-free camera.

Can anyone tell me why this is the issue significantly associated with 5DMII and the company can't fix it after more than three years on the market?

Thanks,
 
4-6 hot/stuck pixels out of > 21 millions? give canon a break ;D....

the higher the pixel density the more chances you get to have hot pixels. Canon can remap them easily for you....

making that an issue is just non-sense. its like wanting a DSLR that gets no dust.... doesn't exist.

if you want a hot pixel free camera, get a film camera.

I had hot pixels on brand new nikon DSLR too (D700s). and even on Leica M9 never was an issue.

RAW converters take care of this.
 
Hot pixels in still mode are mostly taken care of by mapping them out. As far as I know, they cannot be mapped out in video mode, though. Here's a video I took of the new moon just after it has passed Mars. There's a hot pixel that appears in the whole video (about the same size as Mars) but not in the stills taken during the video recording.

http://vimeo.com/17552128
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A few hot pixels may not be a big deal for 21M pixels camera but I believe that the manufacture needs to set bar high. I don't know how often you see hot pixel issue related to other semi- or pro cameras, it seems that this issue is more often associated with 5DMII. Who don't want a "perfect" camera. Having said that, 5DMII is a great camera!
 
Thanx to all for your helpful and convincing comments!

As I shoot mainly stills and do only sometimes video, I think I can live well with at least some hot pixels. By the way, when I have enuff time I'll check my 7D video mode. With stills it does not display any disturbing hot pixel problem, and I do always raw conversion. Never did a vid with the 7D in really dark scenes when you can best spot hot pixels, and in normal conditions it delivers perfect quality. So, as you see, video is no real problem for me. (Much more smut on the sensor when I can't avoid to change lenses somewhere out in the dirt...:-( )

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Picturenaut
 
Nice video of Moon & Mars!
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Picturenaut
 
Why do you say it's a cluster of pixels? I'm not sure you can tell from the video I posted, which has been heavily processed to eliminate noise.
abracadabenhotmailfr said:
thats actually a cluster of stuck pixels. I had the same thing and got canon replace my sensor for free in 3 days.
Click to expand...
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Thanks. I intend to redo the edit to show the processed stills where they were taken. Had I realized the video was going to turn out as well as it did, I wouldn't have interrupted the video that way. At the time, I thought I had a better chance of capturing the event with the stills than with the video.

BTW, if anyone has a suggestion for removing the vertical banding in Sony Vegas, let me know.
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