Dead Pixels on Canon 5dmk2 Image Sensor
My Canon 5dmk2 is headed back in for service! I am having bad luck with this great camera.
I just got it back after having the Compact Flash pin socket replaced. Read up on my broken pin blog by clicking here.
I worked on a music video shoot in Worcester, Massachusetts a few days ago and shot it guerrilla style. Using a glidecam 4000, I shot the “action” portion of the music video in 1080p 30p in available light. A few scenes were so dark, that I had the 55mm f1.2 Nikon lens wide open and the camera set to 6400 ISO!
I could have never shot this video project with any other video camera under these conditions and time restraints.
The client was very happy with the footage and the music video is in post production right now…. BUT… I was told by the editor that there are a three burnt pixels (or hot pixels) on my camera. I was taken by surprise. I did not notice them whilst shooting.
Below are a few screen grabs straight off the 1080p video. I cannot show you any footage until the music video is released.
There was also a behind the scenes documentary crew working this production, so I hope to post that video soon.
PRODUCTION UPDATE: August 5th: First look at “Sleep Alive – Put it on my tab” music video trailer. Click here to watch it.
VIDEO BLOG:
I shot a short little video showing you the bad pixels on the camera. I zoomed into the sensor 10x and could see the three red dots on the LCD screen. The Canon 5Dmk2 was capped and running at ISO 6400. The pixels got brighter as the sensor stayed on and heated up.
Click to Watch!
I will be sending the Canon 5Dmk2 in for repair next week. I will keep you posted with a repair status (date and time) so that you can better understand the process to fix this problem if you are experiencing bad pixels on your Canon image sensor.
REPAIR UPDATE:
August 3rd, 2009 @9am: I contacted the New Jersey Canon Service Center via phone (732)521-7007 and spoke to a tech. I told him about my bad pixel problem and he quickly stated that this would be covered under my warranty. He told me that I would need to send just the camera body with a cap to the service center. He also told me to include a copy of the warranty card and the sales receipt. He suggested leaving a letter with the camera detailing the problem with my name, address and email address. He also added that it would be helpful if I included a cd with pictures showing the bad pixels. I told him I would include a link to this blog entry.
Now that my serial number is in the system, I will be sending the camera in via UPS for service Friday August 7th. I will keep you up to date as the camera goes through the repair process.
UPDATE AUGUST 10, 2009 @10am:
I have packed up the camera and sent it off to New Jersey using UPS GROUND. I included a note with details of the problem, a copy of my warranty card and Adorama receipt and a cd with pictures taken at high ISO showing the bad pixels. I just sent the camera body, capped, in a small Pelican Case.
UPDATE AUGUST 12, 2009 @5:30pm:
I got an email from Canon. They have accepted my repair.
Dear Thomas:
We have received your equipment for evaluation and repair. Based on our initial examination, we will start the necessary repairs at no charge to you. You can expect the repair to be completed and returned back to you within approximately 7 business days* from the date shown above. There is no need to respond to this notice.
Please note that in the unlikely event that any additional internal damage is found due to liquid/water, sand, corrosion, battery leakage or impact (such as dropping the unit), a revised estimate will be sent for your authorization, since these conditions are specifically excluded from warranty coverage.
Thank you for purchasing Canon products and for allowing us this opportunity to serve you.
Best Regards,
Canon Factory Service Center
UPDATE: August 13 @9:30am:
The camera has been fixed and is being shipped back to me via Fed Ex. This is the message that was emailed to me this morning:
Dear Thomas :
We are pleased to confirm that the service you requested on your EOS 5D MARK II has been completed and your equipment has been shipped to you on 13-AUG-09 . The tracking number for your package is xxxxxxx . If you wish to track the status of your shipment through Federal Express, click here, or visit www.FedEx.com and use the tracking number listed above.
Please note that a signature is required for delivery!
Thank you for purchasing Canon products and for allowing us this opportunity to serve you.
Best Regards,
Canon Factory Service Center
There was no charge for this repair. I am VERY happy with Canon Customer Support. I will let you know if they completely fixed the problem when the 5dmk2 arrives.
REPAIR UPDATE AUGUST 14 2009 @5pm
Fed EX just delivered the package to me via Express. Thank you Canon for sending me my camera back to me using a very fast method. This is what the paperwork said when I opened up the box.
“Service Details:
All adjustments and corresponding testing have been completed to Canon factory standards. Firmware was updated to latest version. Remapped dead pixels.”
Not certain why the firmware was updated, I was running the latest version. Happy to hear that the dead pixels were “remapped”. Now it is time to test it out.
REPAIR UPDATE AUGUST 14 2009 @9pm:
I have turned on the Canon 5dmk2 and capped the front. I set the ISO to 6400 and set the shutter to 1/30th. I hit record and let the sensor heat up for 10 minutes. At this point, I stopped the recording and zoomed into the black image 10x. I scanned the entire image and found it completely clean, except for a small dead pixel in the extreme lower left of the sensor. I am happy with the results of the repair! It cost me only to ship it to Canon, about $9 at UPS (ground).
BLOG UPDATE! BLOG UPDATE!
I have included a before and after picture of the capped sensor at ISO 6400 for you to examine. Please click on the below images and use the scroll feature on your browser to look closely at the dead and hot pixels. I increased the video levels in Photoshop to amplify the noise and problematic pixels to make it easier to see.
I was without my 5dmk2 for just four days. THAT IS INCREDIBLE SERVICE. I wonder if this blog thing helps?
Bad bad pixel, no donut for you!
i just cant win!
a few people have emailed or twittered me to tell me these could be “hot pixels”. bad, burnt, dead, hot… whatever. where i come from, this type of phenomenon is unacceptable! i will send this out and let you all know what the techs at canon tell me.
what a pity!
you might want to track back some early footage to check if the offending pixels were already stuck or if they appeared afterwards, which would be worrysome if that means the situation can get worse after the cam is being used for a while.
in photo mode, the 5D is supposed to remap out those dead pixels from the sensor but doesn’t quite have enough processing power to do so in video mode.
i had a bunch of dead pixels right from the start who were successfully remapped by doing the sensor cleaning trick. luckily, they are invisible due to skipped lines in the video mode.
hope you get sorted quickly
thanks. a few other people mentioned “remapping” the pixels. i plan on asking a lot of questions when the camera gets looked at. i hope to talk to someone over at the service center who knows what is going on so that i can report it on this page.
Expecting a 20+ mega pixel full frame sensor to be 100% perfect out of the factory without a correction map would be unrealistic at this price point imho. it’s a bit of a lottery i’m afraid.
like we had a warranty for LCDs stuck pixels ratios staying ‘within specs’ before a replacment, let’s hope such issues are stable and don’t get worse over time as the product ages.
good luck on getting it back
yea, these cameras are cheap and the image is amazing. lets see what canon says.
Looks just like mine
Much more evident at high ISO but they are there even at low ISO. Took pictures at different ISO settings from 200 – 6400 and exposures from 1/60th to 8 seconds. Layered them in Photoshop and zoomed in 1:1 looking for the bright red/white spots in the image. Marked them with an arrow then turn on and off other photo layers to see if they repeat across images. I found an astounding 9 dead pixels that show up in every image. There are more that show up in some images but not others so I don’t know if they come and go or what. It’s pretty easy to distinguish them from the ISO noise. They are glaring orbs of brightness! All of my test images were shot in a span of about 3 minutes. Incredibly disheartening to say the least. I will be calling Canon tomorrow for sure.
philip bloom told me he has not have any problems with bad pixels. we all know how much he loves shooting at high iso in low light.
let me know what canon tells you. i just cannot have these red orbs in my camera shots.
To add to my previous post, I only get 2 evident spots in video compared to the 9 in stills. I did not see anything in my first stills/videos. It seems to be gradually getting worse. First video and stills I shot are clean. I will go back and compare to see when it all started to go down hill.
the longer the camera is turned on, the worse it gets. currently i can only find three bad pixels. i hope more do not appear.
much like a video camera set to 18 db gain, as the sensor heats up, the pixels with problems appear. this happens even on our network television cameras that cost over $100,000.
i was watching nbc the other night in hd. there was a made for tv film shot with the sony f23 or f35 digital cinema camera and in a few of the shots, a dead pixel was clearly visible just left of center in the shot. so this also happens with high end digital cinema. i knew they were using multiple cameras because the dead pixel only showed itself on a few of the shots.
the film was called “the storm”, you may have seen it. it was not very good, but man did the dp love dolly shots!
I noticed the same thing in the show “Pitchmen”. They had one camera that had a glowing white pixel for pretty much the entire series. It was very distracting. I don’t know why they didn’t fix it in post. Maybe they did and just missed some shots? But yes, no camera is perfect no matter how much it costs. It’s just sad to see the 5dmkII take a down turn so quickly. I’ve barely used it. I also have a Nikon D80 that I checked and it is flawless. Granted it is a smaller sensor but it has seen a LOT more use as I’ve had it longer.
i know boston camera is selling a panasonic varicam (the one used on american chopper) dvcpro hd camera for $4000!
they told me it still works, but the lens is not included and the image sensor block has a few dead pixels.
i wonder how many a “few” are. this camera brand new was $70,000! eight years ago!
How are you enjoying your conversion into still frame camera videography so far? Yeahhhh, they have a long way to go
I’ll be honest, I have a few dead pixels including a whole 1/5th of a LINE of dead pixels on my 6 year old Nikon D70, but I’ve learned to just edit them out in every shot. Or, in HDR, the process of combining the images actually erases them (as opposed to making them brighter, which is what I thought would happen)
Obviously, with you using the camera professionally and for paid jobs, it’s not possible to just ignore them. But now that I’m gonna start making money soon (well, still 2 more semesters before I graduate again), I’m going to be in the market for a new camera. This isn’t looking good for Canon so far.
I’ve got 3 weeks off between Aug 17 and Sept 5thish if you want to go around town!
that “sky on fire” shot in your flickr account is great. nice job.
when i get back to fenway, i am going to ask the still photogs about bad pixels in their professional images and see what they say. i would love to hear what they do to get rid of them.
not sure of my schedule, but i promise you we will get back out into the city to shoot another “ultimate” style boston film.
Thanks for the compliment on the flickr picture
To illustrate my problem, I’ve created three pictures:
1) The full shot of a -5E.V. picture I took the other day. ISO was 200, or else the dead line of pixels would be VERY obvious
http://s69.photobucket.com/albums/i52/castevens12/?action=view¤t=LineFull.jpg
2) The cropped area of the dead pixels
http://s69.photobucket.com/albums/i52/castevens12/?action=view¤t=Line.jpg
3) The cropped area, edited to bring out the dead pixels
http://s69.photobucket.com/albums/i52/castevens12/?action=view¤t=LineEdit.jpg
It’s in *almost* all of my shots, but they must not be dead because every once in a while, it looks perfectly fine. My warranty was years over by the time this happened to the camera.
wow. that looks like a comet! this is a all too common problem. working with stills, it is an easy fix. usually, the pros dress up their images and then submit them to clients.
but with video, you tend to pass footage on to an editor and they have to try to fix it in post, resulting in longer hours in the edit suite.
Man you seem to have the worst luck, first the bent pin now this… My 5D2 has been flawless so far… knock on wood…
-J
good luck! hate to say it, but try to search for them like i did in the video on this page above.
cap the lens, turn on the camera, set it to iso 6400, hit record for about ten mins to heat up the sensor, then use the zoom feature to “explore” the sensor close up.
if you find white or red dots, you have the same problem as me!
let me know.
Hi Tom,
I really enjoy your website. It was your use of the Mark 5D II that convinced me to also buy one. I was wondering if you can detect the pixel problems on “Burial Site”?
great cal, glad i convinced someone else to buy this camera! (like i had too!)
here is the thing, the camera worked flawlessly on “burial site”. i double checked the footage and found no image problems. this is why i am sending the camera in for service. it only has a few hours on it and burnt/dead/hot pixels should only appear on an image sensor after years of use.
thanks for the comment.
yeah, i find it peculiar that it didn’t ship with the lit/dead pixels initially and that they failed so quickly. you may just want to request a new unit. maybe the traffic this is generating on your page may be enough to persuade them to do so (you’ve sold at least one confirmed 5d for them already) and having them come through and replacing this unit would be good karma for them.
not to mention this is a pro-grade device under warranty with more than 1 service call already. this particular unit should be taken back and re-sold as a factory refurb.
Not to mention Tom’s got people like me coming to his site: I am a photo hobbyist and I am in the market for an upgrade to my old Nikon D70. Despite my 3 Nikon lenses, I am willing to switch over to Canon if the right camera is on the other side of the fence. But it’s not looking too great after this.
Of course both Nikons and Canons will have their fair share of problems, but I’m not going to change all my lenses and such just to experience the same problems. We’ll see where this ends up. At least they’ve been nothing but helpful to Tom’s problems, but these events should have never occurred in the first place.
yea. i am not happy. strange that these dead/hot pixels did not show up in “burial site”. i shot that short film in available light at high iso. also, i ran two and a half batteries through the camera that day, so the sensor heated up. i will keep you all posted on the repair. this experience might help you decide, but all that being said, the canon 5dmk2 is alot of camera for the money. AND… i use nikon manual glass with excellent results. just need to get a canon eos to nikon adapter ring. of course, this is all manual glass.
i am going to send it out monday. what you say sounds good, lets see what canon says! keep an eye on this page for repair updates. thanks bill!
Hi Tom…. I had the same problem with a canon xsi and I solved making a manual cleaning senssor procedure… I think 5d have the same on menu… I remove the lens and put camera body lens cover and just start the senssor cleaning torned off an on again a the red piexel disaper
good luck
regads
i did try to manually clean the sensor with no luck. i think this is a problem on the sensor.
Tom,
After the kids went to bed I ran a few test shots with the lens cap on. I found 7 to 8 dead spots. I also tried the manual clean without results. The RAW images were more pronounced than with the JPEG’s. Weird thing is that in the video mode I did not see the spots. I did a search on the web and it appears that this problem is common with this camera. I’m curious what answers Canon will provide for you. Cal
the canon 5dmk2 is boxed and will ship out tomorrow morning to new jersey. i will keep you posted. watch for updates above these comments on this page.
tom
Hi Tom,
Yes I love shooting at high ISO, but I NEVER shoot over 1600 ISO in video mode. Normally between 1250 and 1600 ISO. I find anything higher unusable noise wise. You really shooting 6400 ISO and getting usable images? Even at 3200 I found it unacceptable.
Are those dead pixels at 1600 ISO?
Cheers,
Phil
i agree that anything over 1600 is unusable. BUT… the client wanted a grungy, dirty looking music video. I was running around like a “madman” on the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts with limited time and NO light so I broke the ISO (or tv gain) rules.
I really liked the look, especially for this project. The low light performance of the Canon 5dmk2 is unlike anything I have ever seen.
I find tons of bad and noisy pixels at 6400. But, yes, even at ISO 1600 I get that one big dead/hot pixel to pop out in the upper right of the frame.
The camera is headed back to New Jersey right now.
Hi Tom,
Have you seen Vincent Laforet’s 5D video called “Reverie”? I went back to look for any stuck pixels and I can see one. Not in all of the shots but the ones with higher iso. I decided to return my camera back to B&H until Canon can work out all of the bugs. From what I read on the internet remapping of the sensors can repair the stuck pixels on the still images but usually not in the video mode. Cal
Thanks for posting all this. I saw it months ago when you first when through it and have been paranoid about this happening to me when I buy my DSLR. Long behold, my beloved 7D, which I’ve owned less than a month has this issue. I’m going to scan the sensor and map out where the dead guys live and give Canon a call.
yea, this pixel problem happens with cmos and ccd cameras. even the pro broadcast cameras i use have this problem from time to time.
Unfortunately, Canon is trying to tell me that having a dead pixel on the image sensor is normal. I hope to get it fixed as I only had my camera for about a month. I’m packing it up for another trip to the factory service center. Its about to spend more time at Canon than it has at my house.
Wish me luck.
i have different levels of dead or hot pixels on the sensor. if they show up as bright red spots, this can be fixed by canon at the service center. they do a pixel remapping. my sensor is not perfect, but since it had the remapping done, it is fine.
can i ask you about the pixel incident directly, via email or phone?
thanks
paul
i contacted them via email through the canon support pages.
i currently have a 5DmkII with some red pixels, even at lower ISO’s im about 5 months out of warranty so it seem ill be paying for this repair. im guessing a remapping like you had. i would love to know what it will cost. called 3 canon locations to see if i could get just a ballpark of pricing but none will give any. anyone here know what this repair might cost?
i have no idea what it will cost. this is a big problem. i still have red pixels at higher ISO. i bought a second 5dmk2 and have more red pixels problems. i just hope no one will notice and try to keep the iso down. the camera is only $2500! it does so much for that and i seem to just give up on the pixel remapping. unless it got ridiculously bad.
Just stumble across this website/blog. Thanks for the info. I just took receipt of a new 5D MII today. Without know that this was an issue I started testing out the low light capabilities of the camera. Low and behold during a video test shot at high iso’s I found a pretty big cluster (4×4 or so) of white pixels. Instead of packing it all up and exchanging it for a new camera, I opted to just “beat the snot outta this one” and work the gremlins out and send it in for warranty repairs on Monday.