What happened to my Sensor? (350D)

[muenchphoto]

<p>Hello,<br>

after returning from a festival my shots sometimes had strange banding / stripes within the pictures. I googled for the problem but havn't found out anything about that so far. It is not the usal banding that might occur in low-level-light-shots because it occurs just at one specific position within the picture.<br>

please see: http://www.muenchphoto.de/stripes0.jpg for a fullsize pic and http://www.muenchphoto.de/stripes1.jpg for a crop.<br>

It does not come up in every picture, sometimes its less sometimes more visible. I can't say anything about the ISO but I suspect that I get it more often at higher ISO speeds because its more visible if its a dark shot.<br>

If I make a sensor cleaning, there are no scratches at the surface or anything.</p>

<p>Is my sensor screwed?</p>

<p>Thanks for your effort,</p>

<p>marcel</p>

 

[keith reeder]

<p>Were you near to large speakers/amps/other powered-up electrical equipment?</p>

<p>It looks like RF interference to me...</p>

[sattler123]

<p>Try a different CF card. I've had similar problems with a bad CF card.</p>

[paul_russell1]

<p>It's interesting that there are striations in two directions and that they intersect at the point light source. I suspect this is a physical problem with the read off from the chip, not disimilar in artefact to a problem that used to affect video cameras (known as smear), wheras video cameras eventually went down the frame interline transfer method (FIT) most digital SLRs (with the exception of fuji s3s s5s etc) stick to the frame transfer method (not a bad thing, as it replicateds the behaviour of film better, you don't get 'combing' over the edges of moving subjects)<br>

It could be a clipping artefact as well. Two suggestions: switch the colour mode to Adobe RGB if it isn't there already (this gives the camera wider gamut of colours at the processing end) take the images in "RAW + JPEG". If this option doesn't exsist then try it in RAW only. The camera may have an issue processing an image with such a bright point source, so have a RAW back up, maybe processing it at the PC end will make a difference. Although this will eat through your memory, you can delete any RAWs for images where this doesn't show in the JPEG (although RAWs are better, I have a 400D and there is a difference, even with expensive lenses)<br>

You could also try to update the firmware, or if you are on the latest version, reload it:<br>

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosdigital2/e3kr2_firmware-e.html<br>

Failing all of that it's one for the repair centre. By that point I would be looking at putting the cost of a repair towards a new body (a 1000d or 450d better spec, particularly the bigger, better screen, 14 bit processing, live view) plus the comfort of a 12 month guarantee etc.</p>