D200 owners, pls do a test for me (and for yourselves)

wrote:
Bill wrote:
wrote:

I've heard of that...I think it's just too much signal gain at high ISO
settings in dark shots. Lower the ISO to a more appropriate setting.

It's because of heat coming from electronic circuits near the sensor.
Not entirely surprising after an exposure of 3 minutes at ISO 1600.

Oh...so cooling the sensor would fix it, like with an icecube?

But...how do I get the damn icecube inside the camera. I tried putting
it inside the sensor chamber, but then it blocks some of the light. I
shoved one in the battery slot, but then the camera don't work.

I even tried using the blender to chop up the icecube and shove the
little bits into the CF card slot, but still no good.

What am I doing wrong???

Laser cooling would also work, but the equipment may be somewhat less
than portable.

"RichA" wrote in message
ups.com...

wrote:
Hi all,

I have had a D200 for about eight months, and while I generally love it,
it
has been plagued with a disturbing number of problems.

First was the long banding--I believe they replaced the sensor to fix
that,
but afterward pixels started dying. First I had three dead pixels
remapped,
then two months later I found about 20 new ones, which were remapped.
Now, a
month later I am finding more. Has anyone else experienced anything like
this?

But the latest and greatest weirdness became apparent recently when I
tried
to do a longish exposure--about 3 minutes--of the African night sky. I
was
shocked to find that all four corners and the top of the frame were
luminous
pink--looking like light-struck film. And the whole frame was studded
with
scores of dead-looking pixels of different sizes in white, red and blue.
But
they weren't dead; at shorter exposure times they behaved normally, with
more and more being "blown out" and luminescing as the exposure
lengthened.
There were a few at 30 secs., more at one minute, and a whole lot more at
3
mins. I didn't have the courage to test further...Likewise the pink
fringing
started at about 1 minute and grew progressively worse at longer exposure
times.

Obviously this is going back to Nikon, but I am wondering how many D200
exemplars might suffer from this kind of defect, which is not obvious in
most shooting situations. If you have a D200 and the time and inclination
please try this: Go in a dark room, put a body cap on to stop any light
from
entering at the front, and perhaps the cap on the eyepiece as well, and
do a
3 minute exposure at ISO 1600. I would be interested in hearing about the
results.

TIA,

Toby

Sony putting as much effort into their sensors as their batteries?

Same happened to your D200 too, you have such bad luck Rich?

wrote:

Laser cooling would also work, but the equipment may be somewhat less
than portable.


And it wouldn't run well on those puny LiIon batteries ;-)

--
Thomas T. Veldhouse
Key Fingerprint: 2DB9 813F F510 82C2 E1AE 34D0 D69D 1EDC D5EC AED1

Bill wrote:
wrote:

I've heard of that...I think it's just too much signal gain at high ISO
settings in dark shots. Lower the ISO to a more appropriate setting.

It's because of heat coming from electronic circuits near the sensor.
Not entirely surprising after an exposure of 3 minutes at ISO 1600.

Oh...so cooling the sensor would fix it, like with an icecube?

But...how do I get the damn icecube inside the camera. I tried putting
it inside the sensor chamber, but then it blocks some of the light. I
shoved one in the battery slot, but then the camera don't work.

I even tried using the blender to chop up the icecube and shove the
little bits into the CF card slot, but still no good.

What am I doing wrong???

I use liquid nitrogen batteries. They last longer than the Nikon
lithiums and they keep the whole camera cool. You can find them at any
hardware store near the superconducters and mag-lev garage door openers.

wrote:
Hi all,

I have had a D200 for about eight months, and while I generally love it, it
has been plagued with a disturbing number of problems.

First was the long banding--I believe they replaced the sensor to fix that,
but afterward pixels started dying. First I had three dead pixels remapped,
then two months later I found about 20 new ones, which were remapped. Now, a
month later I am finding more. Has anyone else experienced anything like
this?


No. But most of us are beginning to question that your camera is the
problem.

But the latest and greatest weirdness became apparent recently when I tried
to do a longish exposure--about 3 minutes--of the African night sky. I was
shocked to find that all four corners and the top of the frame were luminous
pink--looking like light-struck film.

Yes. This is a huge improvement over earlier DSLRs, where the pink
fringing, as you call it, would have covered the whole frame in less
than a minute. Photoshop is also a very useful tool if you are
interested in making this noise worse.

Really? Bright red and blue squares exactly four pixels square?

Thanks to all for this info. I guess it doesn't have to go back to Nikon
after all, except to have those new dead pixels remapped.

Toby