Hot pixels - at what point do you consider them an issue?
I have a brand new R6 (purchased 22nd April), and it has one quite obvious red hot pixel that shows up at ISO100 on any long exposures - even at half a second.
Moving to 2 seconds and there’s a couple of red pixels and a white one that are easily visible. At 30 seconds, I can see 7 red or white pixels without zooming in on the image (i.e. just looking at it at 100% on a computer display, not pixel peeping).
Bump it up to ISO3200 and I can see 8 hot pixels on a 1 second exposure (once again, just with the naked eye without zooming in on the photo and looking for issues).
By ISO3200 at 30 seconds there’s easily 35 hot pixels, and it gets rapidly worse from there.
This is a lot worse than I expected for a brand-new expensive camera, and is a lot worse than a 5Div, and worse than I remember in the past on older, cheaper DSLRs.
What do people think? Is this normal? Should I contact Canon? I’ve Googled and the general consensus “on the internet” seems to be that all sensors have some, and you just need to live with them - but I’m a bit unhappy with the level of them on what I assumed would be an excellent low-light sensor.
ISO100
| Exposure time at ISO100 | Number of easily visible hot pixels |
|---|---|
| 0.5s | 1 |
| 2s | 3 |
| 30s | 7 |
ISO3200
| Exposure time at ISO3200 | Number of easily visible hot pixels |
|---|---|
| 1s | 8 |
| 30s | 35+ |
Sample Images
These are unedited out of camera JPEG images, taken at the given settings with the lens cap on.
Not that you need to view images full-size to properly see the hot pixels, the browser’s resizing algorithm is hiding some of them.
These were taken with the default camera settings:
Picture style: Standard
Long exp, noise reduction: Off
High ISO speed NR: Standard
Dust delete data: Never updated
- ISO6400, 30 seconds
- ISO100, 1 second
- ISO100, 2 seconds
- ISO100, 4 seconds
- ISO100, 8 seconds
- ISO100, 15 seconds
- ISO100, 30 seconds
- ISO3200, 1 second
- ISO3200, 2 seconds
- ISO3200, 8 seconds
- ISO3200, 30 seconds
ISO6400
ISO6400, 30 seconds:
I realise this is quite a high ISO but it’s the most obvious way to see the issue. Other lower ISO lower exposure photos are below this.
ISO100
ISO100, 1 second:
In case you’re having trouble finding the pixels, I can easily see a red pixel top left, another red pixel bottom right, and a white pixel towards the top of the centre. I imagine if you zoom in 100% there are probably more that are not as easy to see.
ISO100, 2 seconds:
ISO100, 4 seconds:
ISO100, 8 seconds:
ISO100, 15 seconds:
ISO100, 30 seconds:
ISO3200
ISO3200, 1 seconds:
ISO3200, 2 seconds:
ISO3200, 8 seconds:
ISO3200, 30 seconds:
