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Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos
- photoGrant 3y agodigital cameras carried on planes in the early days had cosmic ray issues too. So they sent them by boat. Hell. The ones today do. This is a weird article though. A lot of cameras compensate for dead pixels and cosmic rays. It should also have been designed in every camera to have unique file names. It’s ridiculous they all don’t.
- sudosysgen 3y agoIf you use a Sony A7 series camera, every month, the camera will take a picture upon shutting it off, which it uses to remove dead pixels/hot pixels - you can hear it, actually. If ever you have a pixel die or get stuck, you can also manually set the date a couple months ahead and turn it off - it will most likely be fixed when it turns back on.
- mschuster91 3y ago> If you use a Sony A7 series camera, every month, the camera will take a picture upon shutting it off So THAT is that mysterious click-clack of the shutter that randomly appears on my A7S2. I've been putting off sending it in for repair, but now I can completely avoid that. Many thanks! Do you happen to have a link to some documentation for it?
- sudosysgen 3y agoAs far as I know, there's no official documentation for it, but people noticed that it happened every month and that it would fix dead pixels (for example: https://www.4kshooters.net/2015/12/01/an-easy-trick-to-fix-dreadful-dead-pixels-in-your-sony-a7s-ii/ https://www.4kshooters.net/2015/12/01/an-easy-trick-to-fix-d...) I personally used this trick twice to fix dead pixels on my camera, so I can attest to that. For cameras without a mechanical shutter, there is instead an option to do it in the menu, for example : (https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2010/v1/en/contents/TP0003229312.html https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2010/v1/en/contents/TP0003229...)
- kuschku 3y agoFunny, on the FX30 it's actually exposed as a setting with a proper description. Maybe because the FX30 lacks the physical shutter, and instead relies on you putting a lens cao on? If so, I'd expect the A9iii to have the message too.
- frostburg 3y agoI would assume so, it's the same on my Sigma fp L.
- strogonoff 3y agoDoes fp L automatically offset raw values in DNG/CinemaDNG files in accordance with the latest dark frame, or is it only applied to JPEG output?
- frostburg 3y agoSorry, I only saw this question now. It does get applied to raws but I think in a non-destructive way (this is also true of Nikon cameras, if you look at the untouched, non demosaicized image you can spot the hot pixels).
- strogonoff 3y agoThanks for the info. I think if you can see hot pixels when looking at the raw before demosaicing then the dark frame is not applied (which makes sense, since a DNG is supposed to be more or less a sensor snapshot). If you do not see them after you processed the raw, I think that would just be your software filtering outliers as best it can, since it would have no way of knowing about the dark frame. I doubt it embeds the dark frame in every DNG, would take up extra space and I am not sure the format even supports that, so likely it just keeps the latest dark frame in memory and applies as part of internal pipeline.
- photoGrant 3y agoA manual sensor clean in most cameras does this. If mirrorless, leave the cap on
- sudosysgen 3y agoIt's not about dust on the sensor, it's actually software that maps dead pixels to fill them in every time you take a picture (as well as dark frame offsetting, presumably)
- photoGrant 3y agoAgain… the manual sensor clean action action does both. Granted I mean the manual ‘automatic’
- sudosysgen 3y agoAh okay, I was confused on what you meant by manual sensor cleaning, to me that means (on a DSLR also locking the mirror up) and swabbing out the dust. On a Sony E-mount camera, the ultrasonic sensor cleaning doesn't do pixel remapping, only the date trick (or the menu option on electronic shutter models) works to trigger it manually.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoMany cameras have a menu option to trigger a dark frame calibration. Been a thing for a long, long time.
- lakpan 3y agoSo, wait. The camera can fix dead pixels but only does so once a month? Dead pixels are dead easy to detect by the sensor, why don’t they do it immediately? Way to ruin a bunch of photos between cleanups…
- yakubin 3y agoEvery photo taken shortens the life of a sensor.
- riversflow 3y agoTo add to this, with those particular cameras(it’s the frame I shoot on), you’re encouraged by the form factor and ergonomics to turn them off when idle to get the most out of the smallish battery, they boot in like 1s. A battery is good for ~350 shutter pulls, I don’t want to use one of those every time I think about taking a picture. Also, a dead pixel is not a ruined photo, it’s a minor inconvenience in editing at worst. And every photo I take on a FF is getting edited, the gorgeous RAW output is what I’m there for.
- lakpan 3y ago> minor inconvenience Do you have software that automatically fixes this issue in all the pictures at once? Because as a non-professional I can only think of a very manual approach. On my old phone, dust made its way into one of the cameras and now all of those photos are forever ruined (or until I find a way to somewhat automate this fixing)
- sudosysgen 3y agoAny real photo editor will allow you to batch a patch heal operations. Lightroom, Photoshop, GIMP, Darktable, etc... all support this.
- sudosysgen 3y agoThat's not really true, it's only a problem for the shutter. The sensor doesn't really break.
- yakubin 3y agoDoes it affect RAW photos or only JPEGs?
- sudosysgen 3y agoIt affects RAW photos, too. You also have similar artifacts sometime from on-sensor phase detection pixels.
- CarVac 3y agoIt's just them performing dark frame subtraction at short shutter speeds too, not just long ones.
- somemirth 3y agoIt’s a poorly written and badly explained article. The first comment does a great job of explaining why, and how the new “firmware” actually works
- Pixie_Dust 3y ago> It’s a poorly written and badly explained article .. And the title is erroneous. The firmware used the noise reduction circuits to disguise the effects of cosmic rays on the sensor.
- jakeinspace 3y agoHey, us embedded programmers never get credit. It’s nice once in a while to steal some from EEs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThe noise reduction they're referring to is dark frame subtraction used for thermal noise and defective hot pixel removal (the latter is what the ISS has to worry about.) Numerous cameras from other companies allow for forcing that on at any speed via menu options, not just slower shutter speeds. I had this feature available on an early 2010's Olympus. They called it "Noise Reduction" (not "noise filter", that's different) and it could be set to off, normal, or "on." On makes it behave like this "special" Nikon firmware, always performing the dark frame subtraction. "Normal" applies some logic based on shutter speed and ISO, and off turns it off completely. Manual dark-frame calibration was also available via the menus. I'm not sure why Nikon is tooting their horn so loudly about adding (only for people in the ISS) what's been available to earthbound users of other camera systems via a menu item for a decade?
- hef19898 3y agoI guess the difference is some better algorithms to identify cosmic ray issues and the like, as oppossed to simple noise reduction.
- wdfx 3y agoExactly - if you think about the automatic dead/hot pixel removal, the camera is going to assume these errors are always in the same location on the image, and maintain a mapping of where they are. If instead in space these errors are caused by cosmic rays and can affect any part of the image randomly, and for a limited time only, then this requires a different algorithm, otherwise the camera will eventually be painting out the entire image as different areas get affected. That all said, I know nothing of the details of these camera firmwares, and they may be doing other things instead. But, I suspect it is not as simple as some comments in this thread suggest... because nothing ever is.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago"Noise reduction" is not dark frame subtraction. What they are very clearly describing is dark frame subtraction, as they repeatedly mention damage from cosmic rays. Things are not helped by this being a press release munged up by a writer. "Noise reduction" is where the camera's image processor applies smoothing over different channels as part of all the other processing it does, such as vignette correction, chromatic diffraction compensation, and remapping for lens distortion. Some but not all of this is bypassed when doing RAW images. RAW processors (especially from the camera manufacturer) typically apply similar corrections automatically, but you have varying degrees of control over this. They're usually better quality due to more computational capabilities, and faster software development cycle vs stuff baked into the camera's ASICs or firmware.
- causi 3y agoI wish there was good software for hot pixel removal in normal digital cameras. Sure you can photoshop pictures one by one, but if you have the same set of bad pixels on every shot and need to remove them in batches? Nothing will do that as far as I know.
- lm28469 3y agoI'm pretty sure you can do that in photoshop batch actions for a good 15 years
- terramex 3y agoI once used astrophotography tool DeepSkyStacker for that. Loaded all my photos as light frames, prepared and loaded a dark frame, turned off alignement, post-processing etc and turned on "Create a calibrated file for each light frame". It subtracted given dark frame from every photo and exported them to 16-bit TIFFs. It can be used from command line if you want to automate it more or make custom GUI. Windows only unfortunately, but it is open source.
- sudosysgen 3y agoIf you use Lightroom, make a 1 pixel patch around the hot pixels, and then copy/paste the edits. Basically every other image editing software is also going to allow a similar workflow.
- gsich 3y agoNikon should fix file numbering in general.
- mikewarot 3y agoThe file numbering system is unique enough that you're not going to have the same file and folder name together, and you can set the prefix, iirc. My photos are in /photos/yyyy/yyyymmdd/nikon1xx/dscnxxxx.jpg and I've been using this system since 1997
- gsich 3y agoNo it's not unique enough. D750 has this naming scheme: DSC_4203.jpg (or nef). Which obviously wraps at 9999. Z7 has SZ7_1234.jpg - still not better. Several subfolders don't count, it's the same folder that is important.
- mikewarot 3y agoThe D5100 creates a new folder when it wraps.
- gsich 3y agoYes. On camera it's not an issue. The issue comes when you want to store more than 10000 pictures (or even a subset who happen to have the same numbering) in the same folder. But I already wrote that subfolders don't count. To quote Ken Rockwell: >File numbers have three programmable letters (good), but then an underscore and only 4 digits, so it only can make 10,000 shots before file names repeat. At 120 FPS it's trivially easy to make more than 10,000 shots in just a half hour of shooting sports, and now you have to keep all those images in separate folders because you can't put two files with the same name in the same folder. Nikon needs to replace the underscore with a digit so we have at least five digits in our file numbers. Even LEICA's pokey LEICA M9 of 2009 uses seven digits in their file names to prevent duplicates, and that camera barely worked at 1 FPS. It's an arbitrary restriction in the camera software. It needs to be fixed.
- ISL 3y agoI wish every manufacturer had an option for unique, nonrepeating, filenames!
- gsich 3y agoNikon does not - in general. It's only for this special usecase unfortunateley.
- COGlory 3y agoWe do a very similar thing for X-Ray rejection from electron microscope cameras.