[Dr_who]

I have to head to work soon, but when I get back I'll certainly go thru them afterwards and see if I can find any lines. I really don't want to thou a sI like to think this is a much more narrow problem *crosses fingers*

[sveinmb]

Notice the speckly noise on the dark object? Actually, some of those pixels are fully unexposed, i.e. zero information captured.

I've never encountered that on a camera before, I found one solution was in photoshop if shooting raw is to tweak the black level.

Your explanation makes a lot of sense now.

Strangely its more apparent using MS Picture viewer than in photoshop

And you're not talking about black level trimming/clipping now guys? Lightroom for instance, loves to set black level trimming to something between 5 or 8 by default, effectively killing data in the low end and making it 100% black.

[falconeye]

My 2 cents ...

@eva2000:
IMGP2678.dng has no line (even in extended analysis)
IMGP2546_1600iso.dng has no visible line (the background is too busy for an extended analysis)

@WinSurfer95, Dr_who:
A visible line which isn't in the vertical center, or which shows up at a normal operating temperature of the sensor, may be considered rare. Depending on how disturbing it is, it may be considered defect or not. But normally, a K-7 won't have this. At least, my pre-production camera didn't have it.


@Everybody else:
To check whether you get a noise line with a heated sensor, or to study the effect, force a red thermometer (e.g., extendend movie recording for half an hour), switch to photo and make an image of a uniform out-of-focus (blurred) background. Then, crop the center and apply auto contrast to see the line. The line may be only one 256-step RGB increment brighter. Once you are able to see the line, you are able to study the dependency on temperature. Note that the effect (normally) is very faint and hardly noticeable. Many would say it is a non issue. The line typically remains invisible with a busy subject.

For the time being, I would say that "I got no line with a heated sensor" statements are as valuable as "Yes, I got a line too" statements.

[Christopher M.W.T]

Well, seems you missed an excellent opportunity to check out your K-7's HDR capabilities here

If you don't mind that I bothered with your image, here's an illustration of what I mean...

Note: Image by C.W Tsorotes, altered by me.

Hey thats cool, much appreciated actually. I did momentarily experiment with the HDR function but due to the very windy day, no tripod my shot didn't come out the best, will try it again though.

The limited experimenting with HDR so far has impressed me though.


Whats your take on the noise in the image out of curiousity?

[mtngal]

I have that line now too. I used movie mode - two clips both under 20 seconds. While it was hot and I had been taking lots of pictures, the camera never got over-heated. It looks like the line that started this thread - the one rather green line in the center, going vertically down if you are holding the camera in landscape mode. It appeared right after I tried the movie mode, but not before. It's not in every frame, but quite consistent. I was shooting raw+ and it shows up on both the raw and jpg versions. It isn't very big, but is noticeable in both at the reduced monitor-size and 100%.

I'd guess that its related to the movie mode - I had tried live view briefly before trying the movie mode and the couple of pictures I took between live view and movie mode didn't have the line.

I suppose it could be temperature related - while the camera didn't indicate it was overheated, it wasn't cool in the sun today.

I'll probably never use movie mode again, or very rarely. I just tried today to see how it works. If the line goes away, I don't know what to do - should I send the camera back to Amazon, Pentax, or what? This does sound like a common problem.

[Edvinas]

There's an EXIF parameter "Camera temperature" in Maker Notes.

Could you run exiftool / Photo ME and look what camera temperature was in pictures with vertical line?
Also what hardware revision?

Anyway, this looks really bad. Will Pantax be financially capable to do a product recall?

[mtngal]

I use a mac so I don't have photome. I've looked further - every picture I took after I tried the movie mode has it, there's one or two where I can't really see it because of a busy picture, but I can see it on most of them. It's more obvious on some - I can upload the original to zenfolio but I know it does strip a few things out of the exif information (any imbedded GPS data, for one).

[ragtop]

I heard someone say on another forum that all problem camera's came from Amazon.com as Pentax gave them the first production run. Once this flaw was noticed, Amazon.com pulled their remaining stock.

At this stage I don't know how much truth there is to this statement, has anyone else heard this? Also, is anyone tracking serial #'s of the problem camera's?

I'm curious because I have one coming from Walmart.com and it's due to be delivered to me Tuesday.

Jim

[mtngal]

Here are links to the full sized original jpg files of 3 examples.

This is the first one I noticed it on - I was going to crop it significantly so was looking at it almost 100%. Pushed the exposure a bit and it really jumped out at me, even though the background is green, too.

http://mtngal.zenfolio.com/img/v4/p330224992.jpg

http://mtngal.zenfolio.com/img/v6/p477518957.jpg

This last one is significantly underexposed on purpose. I used spot metering and was metering off of the white feathers, I had the thought of using the raw version and pushing it, to try to keep the maximum amount of detail in the white goose's feathers. I normally don't underexpose this much, but domestic geese are like Great Egrets - hard to get detail in the feathers they are so white. If you look at this one at 100% without pushing you can see the line if you know where to look for it. Push it much at all and its really noticeable.

http://mtngal.zenfolio.com/img/v5/p501530975.jpg

[Edvinas]

I use a mac so I don't have photome. I've looked further - every picture I took after I tried the movie mode has it, there's one or two where I can't really see it because of a busy picture, but I can see it on most of them. It's more obvious on some - I can upload the original to zenfolio but I know it does strip a few things out of the exif information (any imbedded GPS data, for one).

Exiftool is crossplatform. Download it from here: ExifTool by Phil Harvey

In terminal then run:
exiftool -CameraTemperature -ManufactureDate -ProductionCode <filename_of_picture>

[mtngal]

Wish me luck - I have no idea what a terminal window is. But I've found a reference to it in a book I have, which seems to have some directions about it. I'll be back.

[Edvinas]

Wish me luck - I have no idea what a terminal window is. But I've found a reference to it in a book I have, which seems to have some directions about it. I'll be back.

Applications->Utilities->Terminal

[mtngal]

That was the easy part.

I tried to type in what you wrote and I either get "-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline' " or nothing.

[skinja]

Just like a car, you never want to buy the first production year model. Anyway, if this is affects more than just your body, Pentax may have seen it's last days. Camera stores like Ritz in the US and Jessops in the UK seem to stop carrying them, and this may well secure that anyone who still is, doesn't anymore.

Hey K-9, Have you ever spent any time at a Ritz camera store? for those of us that have, it's probably a blessing.... NO I know its a blessing. can't speak about Jessops.

[mtngal]

Victory! I did it a slightly different way, using the commands you gave me along with something I read in the on-line page. It says 36C.

Forgot to add the rest of the information - it's "36 C 2009:06:20 2.2"

What's the Production Code?

P.S. Now that I've sort-of figured it out, I looked up the temperatures of several pictures - one of the last pictures I took before the line appeared (and before I tried the movie mode) was 34C, and the last picture I took that afternoon (and I didn't see the line as clearly, though it could have had more to do with the picture) was 35C. I had been out earlier in the day, trying HDR stuff, and the last picture was only 27C. I'll check it out in the morning (it's well past my bedtime now, but it was an interesting exercise, trying to figure this out).