What's the weird line on my picture?

It's not happening in all of my photos. It only did it to 2 or 3 out of the 100 I took yesterday. It was super cold outside, well below freezing.

 

I have a Nikon D7000 with a AF-S DX Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens.

 

 

At best, card failure. Or trouble with writing to the card because of a faulty card reader. At worst, a sign of your sensor being at the brink of calling it quits. First thing to try is to use a different card. Or at the very least, format the existing one in camera. If card failure can be excluded, I guess it is time for the camera to make a trip to Nikon.

Your image file is corrupted. Please take a look at this thread from 2012: Nikon D800E, Image File Corruption

 

Most likely it is merely a memory card issue, but potentially it can be a camera body issue also. Since your D7000 has dual SD card slots, I would use two cards and set it up as backup so that each image file is written onto both cards. If only files on one card are corrupted, that answers your questions.

 

I would remember which SD card is having this issue. If it is indeed a card problem, I wouldn't use that card again.

Yeah it looks like file corruption and not a sensor malfunction.

Incidentally, while it is rare, there can be some occasional glitches such that one image file is corrupted. Recently I have a corrupted image captured by a D850. Before that it was the D800E in 2012, but that was clearly a memory card issue. The last time before that was in 2007 for me. When you have 2, 3 corrupted files among a 100, there is definitely something malfunctioning, and most likely the problem will get worse over time.

 

If it is the card reader as Dieter suggests, you should be able to transfer from the card again without such corruption.

Edited December 27, 2017 by ShunCheung

I had similar issues a few months ago. It was a faulty USB cable in my case.

Thanks everyone. I'm going to switch SD cards and see if that works.

To me it seems like data corruption that happened before geometric correction was applied. Question is whether this is image is from incamera jpeg or from raw and post processing software. If former, corruption likely happened before anything was written on memory card. If latter it is possible that memory card has problems.