Stuck pixels, dust?

M_digicapt wrote:

Hi, the first picture is a really bad shoot I took with the E-PM2. Still getting use to it, is quite different from my other two cameras. Anyhow, I zoomed in to inspect it before deleting when I noticed white dot/pixels sprinkled through all over. I already has done pixel mapping and blown air to the sensor. I used one of the special lens swabs to sweep the sensor, pixel mapped again, turned on the noise reduction, switched to a different lens and took the second shot. There is less of them but still some, same place when taking a photo of a different thing. They only seem to show in high ISO or under exposed shots. Is the anything worse than dead/stuck pixels/dust I should be checking for?

Thanks.

Frankly, I could see no speckles at all in the first image, it looked as expected. Some weirdness due to jpeg effects and excessive sharpening, that's all.

In the case of real (white) speckles due to noisy pixels, the pixel map should fix that. Or careful use of noise reduction. Personally I never use noise reduction in camera and use low sharpening, then it is easier to post process fix any issues that annoy.

Dirt/dust on the sensor will show as a dark blurry smudge (never light) which becomes more obvious when using f/11, f/16 etc but may be invisible at say f/8 or f/5.6

I have never cleaned any of my sensors in many years now and results wide open to say f/11are always good, but a clear sky shot at f/22 may show dust. I ignore that.

Regards.... Guy