I recently bought my first digital camera, an Olympus D450Zoom. Loved it, but found all pictures had a "bright spot" in the exact same portion of the image - I assume this is due to a defective pixel on the light-sensitive element? The bright spot is only visible when the image is itself dark in the defective area, so many photos look okay, but the defect is always visible when the subject is brown or black in the affected quadrant.

Question: is this a common problem for digital cameras? I want to exchange the camera for a replacement, but am I likely to have the same problem with the next one.

-- Rich Miller (millerr@umich.edu), January 08, 2000

Answers

The simple answer is:
Take it back! Bring several photos that show the problem. Your camera should not have any dead pixels this soon. In time you may have some pixels go bad - perhaps not. A new CCD with a bad pixel or two indicates infant mortality - and that puts the whole thing into question. It's unlikely (not impossible) for the camera to have left the factory with this defect.
As far as it being a common problem - I don't know. I have a Sony FD- 91. The first one I purchased went back because of a few dead pixels in the LCD viewfinder. But there are no dead ones in the CCD - yet!

DES

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), January 08, 2000.

If you want to test it, take 2 or 3 photos of a white page in macro mode (if you don't have macro mode don't care, do normal mode). If you have not more or less white pixels at same place on all pics..then you have localized dead pixels.

You could do same in completly dark photo but some camera add noise if to low light.

-- Dod (dodfr@yahoo.com), January 10, 2000.