I just ran into a problem with my new Kodak P850 camera, and eventually managed to resolve it. I’m posting about it in the hope that it may be useful for others.
I was using the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my P850 to review a number of digital pictures for inclusion in my last blog entry (about Tommy). In several of the pictures, I noticed a white blob in the same place in each shot. At first I thought it was a stuck pixel on my laptop (no), then that it might be a bug in the EasyShare software (no). I opened one of the most obviously affected images in Photoshop Elements and verified the existence of the defect.
I was puzzled. Had the problem always been there? I looked back through my library. The early pictures were just fine. The problem showed up as a single white pixel in a picture taken on April 10, and over time grew to affect a small cluster of pixels. It was hard to see except with a solid dark background, but once you knew where to look it was present in everything. (For an example, look at the hi-res version of the picture of Tommy in the preceding blog entry. Look at the middle of his left ear and scan right towards the edge of the cushion.)
At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. Was this a CCD defect, like a dead pixel in an LCD screen? What was the warranty position on such things? I surfed over to the Kodak web site and drilled down through consumer cameras, P series, P850. I wasn’t even sure what terminology I should be using. The web site offered an interactive troubleshooter, but none of the questions seemed to address my symptoms.
Eventually I found the FAQ. I didn’t know what question to ask, so I had to scan through the whole thing, 10 entries at a time. On the last screenful, the question
What are pixel defects and amplified digital noise?
appeared. This looked about right. The symptoms matched what I was seeing.
The solution was to upgrade the camera firmware from version 1.00 to 1.01, then use the Calibrate Imager function to, er, calibrate the imager. The firmware download was easy, but installation was fiddly: it doesn’t seem to work with a dock. Instead you have to use a USB cable, remove your SD card, copy the new firmware file to a suitable location*, transfer the firmware to the camera using EasyShare, restart the camera in order to update the firmware, restart the camera again, and reinstall the SD card. Then, and only then, I was able to run Calibrate Imager from the camera’s maintenance menu.
The final test was to take a few uniformly dark images to see if any pixel defects were lurking. So far it appears that answer is no – but I’ll be checking regularly. After all, this pixel defect just crept up on me….
Meanwhile, as the FAQ points out:
NOTE: Using the Calibrate Imager feature to reset the imager on the camera will not fix pixel defects in pictures you have already taken. You may be able to edit existing pictures with image-editing software on your computer.
Doh!
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* I had to put it on my Desktop under Mac OS 10.4.7; the EasyShare application wouldn’t allow me to select the mounted DMG image.