When coming back from last weekend’s landscape tour, I knew I had a keeper with me: The brilliant yellow field of rapeseed with a dark blue sky of a passing thunderstorm makes for a simple, but really effective landscape image. Rule simplify for better photos applied at its best. Nothing special, but I certainly like looking at it again.
And suddenly, I saw it: A hot pixel. Hot pixels (or stuck pixels) can occur on any image sensor, and usually get mapped out in the camera – after the mapping, the pixel or subpixel will no longer contribute to the final image, and the value for it will be interpolated from its neighbouring pixels. So what really is a hardware defect, even if its a small one as there are 11,999,999 other pixels left, gets corrected in software. It is not very dramatic as well, but once you see it you see it in every picture – and reviewing older photos it got stuck already a month ago, and therefore is on all photos I took since then with the Pen.
Here is a 100% crop of the image above with the hot pixel in all it’s beauty:
Panic! I will need the camera for my vacation in 4 weeks! If I send it in, how long will Olympus need for the repair?
I wrote an email to the Olympus support (it’s di.support@olympus-europa.com in Europe, in case you need it) asking where to send it to. I confess, I have underestimated the Olympus engineers. Won’t do it again, promised. It is Nikon who asks to send the body in for such a fix.
Olympus support replied within 90 minutes of opening their hotline on Monday morning, and politely hinted I should try the “pixel mapping” function. Blush. Ok, RTFM – the camera already has the self-healing function built it. I triggered it using the procedure as described in the camera’s manual on page 129 – menu button, “gears” menu, sub-item I, function Pixel Mapping. Some seconds wait, problem gone!
Kudos, Olympus!
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