On 11/12/2014 16:44, Savageduck wrote:
On 2014-12-11 16:26:29 +0000, "Danny D." said:

Savageduck wrote, on Thu, 11 Dec 2014 08:23:07 -0800:

If the saga of the dropped phone is a report of an actual event,

It's not. It's just that the phone is 3 years old, Samsung Galaxy S3,
and it has been dropped a zillion times. But, I don't know actually
*what* specifically caused the rainbow stripes.

They seem to come and go, and mostly they seem to come when the
battery is low (but not always).

I can't be the only one on the planet with this particular problem,
so, that's why I am asking around.

I'm curious *what* makes those rainbow stripes, but only when the
flash is operating. This seems odd, because, without flash, the
pictures are fine, yet - thinking about it - the flash itself has
NOTHING to do with the picture taking operation.

So that's why it's weird.

To me it looks like a corrupted file issue. If that is the case it is
probably the damaged camera circuit writing the corrupted file only when
the flash fires.

No. It is the analogue readout amplifier seeing some of the AC current
from the circuit that steps up the flash voltage. The connector(s) or
decoupling capacitor has sustained damage.

If the defect pattern is reproducible it can be fixed with a dark frame
subtraction but I think the OP is out of luck.

Whole lines of the image are mangled to varying degrees and worse in
dark conditions when the gain is right at maximum. Data corruption of a
JPEG file trashes 8x8 blocks as the minimum. Usually the image is OK up
to some point and then goes haywire. This was a failure in data
acquisition rather than in post processing. Demosaicing did it no
favours but the damage was already done by that stage.

If the phone is 3+ years old and you need a camera with flash, then the
time has come to replace it. If the phone is functioning, and you can
live without the flash, then carry on using it until it dies.


--
Regards,
Martin Brown