Photography Tech Tip: Minolta/Sony solution against hot pixels, stuck pixels

Solution against hot pixels, stuck pixels.

 

I noticed this tonight on a photo shoot while doing very long exposures at night.

 

Once a month, when switching off, the SLR camera will shoot a black image (not even opening the shutter) and look for stuck pixels to update the “dead pixel map” of the camera. The switching off appears slower when this happens (the red light will blink a little longer), but after this step the problem is automatically corrected.

 

If you want to correct it by yourself, the only thing that you have to do is to change the date in the camera menu, move it forward at least further than the next 1st day of the next month, switch off the camera (let it do its little game of red light), switch it on again, shoot one picture, go to the menu and change the date back, then switch off the camera.

 

After this, your Sony camera updated its hot pixel mapping and knows where to expect them. It will automatically remove them from the picture and just interpolate values from the neighboring pixels. Instead of having an ugly white spot, you’ll get a microscopic and all-but-invisible loss of resolution (one-pixel resolution loss out of 6 to 20 million is still acceptable, isn’t it?)

 

It works with all Sony SLR cameras (and older Minolta or Konica/Minolta cameras). To be kept somewhere in the back of our memory.