One of the worst and most frustrating things that you might experience as a proud owner of a brand spanking new Sony A7S II, besides dropping and crashing it accidentally, of course, would be that moment when you spot a white dreadful dot in the middle of the rear display of your precious new 4K camera.
The things might get even worse when you realise that this isn’t just a dust speck on your lens, but an awful dead pixel produced by a malfunction of your camera sensor. Well, US-based cameraman and blogger Erik Naso have just gone trough a similar experience with his brand new Sony A7S II. He even posted a picture of the dead pixel on his Instagram and Facebook profiles.
After trying a handful of solutions that unfortunately didn’t work Erik decided to send the camera back to Sony for warranty service, when suddenly a guy called Kyle Chappell came up with a solution that he posted on the Naso’s Facebook page.
The post is still there and as Erik Naso suggests you may consider “coming by and giving it a like”! It’s not always the perfect fix but it seems that in many of the situations it resolves the nasty dead pixel issue. So, if you are one of those who lately has faced the same problem, don’t panic! Simply go through the following steps instead.
On your Sony A7S II set the date/time two months forward (or backward) and then turn the camera off. Wait about five seconds while the shutter of the camera closes. The sensor should re-map and the dead pixels should be gone. Fortunately, in this particular case the simple hack worked like a charm. As Eric Naso points out the Sony A7S II is programmed to perform sensor re-mapping once every month automatically. So, when you change the date with a month forward or backward you are actually forcing the camera to do the remapping once it’s turned off.
Furthermore, it seems that this trick should also successfully work on the other Sony alpha cameras so if you have experienced the same issue this is the first thing you should try out in order to deal with it.
Kudos to Erik Naso and Kyle Chappell for sharing this simple, yet extremely efficient trick with the community as this is a great way to resolve the issue and save a lot of headaches of all the shooters out there who otherwise should spend a lot of time and effort looking for a resolution and eventually send their camera to the authorised service centres.
[source: Erik Naso]
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time traveling trickery…
This pixel cleanup has been around for a lot of years. It was actually documented about three years ago in a Sony forum. It works wonders. Too bad it isn’t in the operating manual in big bold letters!
what happen when there are clusters of red pixels that apprently where already mapped before?
I had this problem when shooting a short movie and this trick helped me. Now I want to do this trick before every day of recordings. Can remapping frequently the camera damage it? It’s a Sony A6000. Thanks!