marty,

Would be interesting to see your shots of it. Maybe your LIT pixels
will become less noticable if you play with the iris ring.

I have my camera and will try to capture a few frames here shortly. On another weird note, I had to adjust my backfocus on the manual lens at lunch, so I had the camera hooked to a 42" LCD while performing this. When I was done, I put the lens cap on and checked for the lit pixels. None. I cranked the gain to +12. Nothing. I changed the shutter to 1/6 sec.....nothing. Okay, maybe at 1/6 I could see a spec....a teeny tiny spec in one of the areas. I was straining to see it. It would not have been visible under normal shooting conditions.

Putting it back to 3db and normal shutter speed and it is clean as....well...something that is very clean!

So I struggle with the intermittent nature of this. I will still try to grab a few frames for you.

I dropped my camera off at Canon's European repair centre today. It will take 2 to 3 weeks for them to fix this (estimation).

We'll wait and see what happens. One thing that I know for sure is that I am going to do check for this issue weekly once I get it back and while it is still under warranty. It appears that this is a common issue.

Floris,

Your camera will sit next to mine as I dropped it off on monday here
in Antwerpen. They told me that Canon here use a Company called
ETB which is Canon's repair technicians, and yes they are in Holland.

Do you know if it is the same repair center your go to?

Yes, it is ETB in Roosendaal, The Netherlands. It is like a one-hour drive from Antwerpen I think. You could pick it up there if you wanted.

Thanks Floris, I'll find them and give them a call if it takes too long.

The long wait has begun. I can check the status of my repair and it says the camera shipped to repair location and it took two days. I wonder if they shipped my camera to Canon's Repair Center in Irvin, USA. Looks like they did.

My camera was opened by a technician yesterday, closed on the same day, checked today and the case was closed as well. So I think it will be a few days until I have it back and then I will also learn what they repaired/fixed.

I am very happy that I will soon be reunited with my camera.

Good Luck Florence. Canon has always been quick to turn around cameras when I send them in. However, they are often very vague on what they actually do to the camera. I have sent 3 different cameras to them for specific problems and the paperwork returned always says something like "camera checked and returned to manufacturer specifications". Huh?

I had to call and talk to a few people and insist they get me some info before they finally told me they replaced a bad circuit board that was causing noise in the original XL1.

Did you send a detailed description of the issue and some frame grabs to guide them to the bad pixels? I would be concerned because the issue can be intermittent and the day they put it on the test bench may be a "good day" and the tech might not see anything wrong.....hope this is not the case for you.

Thanks,
Marty

Marty, I shot a reference tape while the problem was imminent and included that in the box which shipped to Canon. So they have a tape, as well as a link to a reference movie I posted on my server, which showed multiple hotpixels around my screen and I also wrote down "my CCD is infested with hot pixels. They are all over the place. Please check thoroughly." I will check the camera straight after I pick it up. If the problem is still there, the camera goes back to Canon but in that scenario I will demand a replacement camera. It takes around 2 - 3 weeks each time and it has been long enough.

I am picking up my camera tomorrow. I already got a letter from ETB (repair partner) which states: housing cleaned, videoheads cleaned and pixels reconfigured (sounds like pixel mapping).

Great to hear! I hope it all works out great for you. I can't remember if you were able to reproduce this at will or not.....were you? If so, it will be great to get it back and change your camera to the exact settings and situation that caused the hot pixels to appear and then know 100% for certain that it is resolved. Personally, I have had experiences where the few hot pixels I have seen have disappeared for a while only to return later....so for me it would be hard to 100% verify immediately if it was fixed.

Thanks.

I think they will have ways to test this. For example, when you set gain to -18db you have the highest chance of seeing those pixels. But of course they can never be completely sure. We'll just wait and see.

That is the correct reason due to the increase in (micro) voltage to the pixels in the higher DB range. To see the dead pixels, wrap the camera up in a blanket for an hour and place at the highest DB gain....they will be present.

That may be true but I recently shot an event in Ohio in February, it was 30 degrees outside and probably not all that warm inside either. I was at +3 gain and the hot pixels were there immediately. I had to go to 0db and use a 1/30th shutter to make up some light. Still, I could see one of these bad boys in several shots.....despite the camera having been "cold". So I think we can rule out that heating up is the only cause of this issue.

This is not a scientific theory, but it seems to occur more often than not with the 20x lens. I can't recall a single time that I have seen these with the 16x manual lens. Just a thought.