Hot Pixels

[Gaz J]

Just wondering if,when you buy a new camera, the sensor should be free of hot pixels or if there's a tolerance on how many can be on the sensor before it is classed as not good enough. And does the sensor degrade over time and use with regard to hot pixels appearing.

 

[Nod]

A few can be accepted as a fact of life, although they shouldn't be in critical areas of the sensor! Many cameras can be remapped to diminish the effect. Not sure what the tolerances are but say 5 on a 10MP sensor, works out at 0.00005% failure or so (probably an order or 2 out!)

 

[KayJay]

I wrote a blog post about this after I bought my first 5d2 camera. I felt that there was an unnacceptable number of hot pixels and after several test shots and explanations to the people I bought the camera from I finally got a replacement which has next to no hot pixels. They don't cause a lot of issues, as a lot of photo editing applications will automatically remove them because they are so minuscule that it has no effect on image quality, but in that blog post you can see in the image that there are actually areas of pixels that are hot. There is also a link to a 'fix' for the issue which may work on other cameras.