A 1-pixel spot has recently begun to show up on my images. It's equivalent to a pinhole in a neg in appearance. I've tried taking pics with other cards, and have cleaned the lens. I think the problem iw with the camera/ccd (?). Has anyone else experienced this or know anything about what could be going on, or a fix. I have an inquiry to Olympus, but I thought I'd try here also. Please advise. Thanks.

-- Ringo Santiago (ringos@asheragency.com), March 01, 2000

Answers

The problem is almost certainly *something* to do with the CCD, only trick is finding out what it is. Black or white spot? - If black, might be a dust speck that's landed on the CRT surface. Olympus needs to open the camera up & give it a good dusting. (If it moves around your frame, definitely dust.) If white, could be a "leaky" pixel. Only shows up in long exposures, not short ones? Almost definitely a bad pixel. If it's only showing up in 1-4 second exposures, they probably won't fix it, as that's reasonably normal for a CCD. Given that you described it as similar to a pinhole in a negative (black spot on the "print"), I'm betting on a dust speck...

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), March 04, 2000.

A possible software fix for a "bad pixel" in an image would be to use Mike Chaney's QImage Pro program Version 7.7, which has a filter called Dark Current to fix your problem. (It also does a lot of other useful things for digital images!) For more info go to: http://www.charm.net/~mchaney/imaging/index.html

Mike Saxon

-- Mike Saxon (msaxon@brunet.bn), March 19, 2000.