Canon engineers have designed a lens that quite literally and intentionally sucks. The lens pulls in air, swirls it across the image sensor in the camera body, and then pushes it out in order to get rid of the internal dust that causes nasty dark spots in your photos.
A few days ago, Nikon Rumors pointed out that Nikon had suddenly removed "image sensor cleaning" from the tech specs of the recently announced Nikon Z50. Earlier today, we were able to confirm with Nikon USA that this feature is, indeed, missing from the company's latest mirrorless camera.
Remember the Nikon D600 sensor dust issue? The problem—and resulting service advisory—dominated the headlines for a couple of years, from the time the issue first surfaced in 2012 until Nikon announced it would fix all D600s for free in 2014. But it seems that free service is finally coming to a close.
Seeing spots in your photos? Your camera's sensor might need a cleaning. If you'd like to go a do-it-yourself route and beyond a simple bulb blower, Michael The Maven made this 13-minute video walkthrough on how you can go about cleaning a mirrorless camera sensor.
Photographer Chris Lambeth offers this short and sweet 3-minute tutorial on how you …
Well this is... interesting. Most sensor cleaning methods involve either some sort of blower, a wet cleaner, or a stick with some sticky stuff on it. The product above takes a different approach: it packs a small vacuum cleaner into a Canon L lens lookalike shell.
At least one of the class action lawsuits against Nikon about the sensor spec issue found on some D600 cameras has been settled, and settled in the best possible way for the users participating in this suit.
If you're wondering just how big of a pain in the butt for Nikon the D600 sensor oil/dust issues have been, all you have to do is go back into our archives and read about the lawsuits and the outrage... or read the comments on the D610 announcement post.
On the off-chance that's not enough, however, we now have a dollar figure to add to the mix. $17.7 million. That's how much Nikon has allocated to put an end to the D600 issues and repair its damaged reputation.
News that Nikon had been replacing some defective D600s with brand new D610s broke months ago, but it wasn't confirmed officially until late last night when Nikon announced the news itself.
Nikon has probably had just about enough when it comes to the D600 and its sensor dust/oil issues. It started with user complaints, evolved to class action lawsuits from a number of different sources, and has now escalated to a full-on order by the Chinese government to stop D600 sales in China after a state-run television show featured a scathing exposé about the issue.
Following on the heels of the news that no less than four law firms were going after or planning to go after Nikon over the D600 dust/oil spot debacle, Nikon has issued a service advisory announcing that they will fix ALL D600 cameras with sensor dust/oil problems for free regardless of warranty status.
Just over a week ago, we reported on the news that a US law firm was collecting information from disgruntled Nikon D600 users for a potential class action lawsuit. Well, it turns out they're actually late to the game. Three days after that story broke, a few other law firms actually filed a class action suit against the Japanese camera giant.
A US law firm is in the process of collecting information from upset Nikon D600 owners to possibly file a class action lawsuit against the Japanese camera giant over the D600's widely-reported sensor dust/oil issues.
Nikon's release of the D610 was met with a bit of... hostility... from many of the D600 users who were and still are dealing with sensor spot/oil/dust (whatever the heck you wanna call it) issues. But it looks like at least a few D600 owners have been treated to a nice surprise from the company service center.
Way back when, I wrote about the dust problems we were seeing in Nikon D600 cameras. There was enough of a furor about it that when the Nikon D610 was released I assumed that the dust problem would be fixed. But I’m rather the paranoid type, and I never like assumptions, so as soon as the first D610s were delivered I thought it worthwhile to just double-check that assumption.
The most recent camera announcement news and rumors have come mainly out of the Sony camp, but it looks like Nikon has a couple of new cameras up its sleeve as well, including a new D610 that will finally put to rest the D600's sensor speck issue by replacing the camera all together.
In October 2012, LensRentals owner Roger Cicala reported that the Nikon D600 seems to collect more sensor dust than other DSLRs. Other owners began reporting the same thing, and different theories began emerging to explain the origins of the annoying specks.
When Imaging Resource reached out to Nikon for comment, it was told that Nikon customers are encouraged to have their cameras serviced if the dust becomes "bothersome." Nikon finally issued an official advisory this past Wednesday regarding the issue, but its message is the same.
Photographer Kyle Clements' time-lapse showing specks accumulating on the Nikon D600 over the first 1000 shots has been seen by nearly 200,000 people around the web in less than a week. Through the exposure his experiment has gotten, Clements received a good deal of feedback and suggestions regarding further experiments and what the specks might be. He has since done two new time-lapse experiments that sheds a little more light on the issue.
The whole situation surrounding Nikon's D600 dust issue is turning out to be eerily similar to Apple's iPhone 5 purple haze problem. In both situations, there are people who are very bothered by the "flaw", people who wonder what all the fuss is about and believe the complaints to be overblown, and a slow response from the companies. Now Nikon is also doing exactly what Apple did: respond to complaints saying that what users are seeing is normal.
It has been widely reported that the new Nikon D600 full-frame DSLR suffers from a higher-than-normal amount of dark spots appearing on the sensor. Yesterday we shared one photographer's time-lapse video that demonstrates that the issue occurs right out of the box without any lens swaps.
Photographer Daniel Gaworski has been experiencing the same problem, and decided to take a closer look at his D600. He discovered that his camera's shutter curtain contains scratch marks on the bottom flap (see above), particularly in one corner of the camera.
Back in October, we wrote that the Nikon D600 suffers from excessive sensor dust in the upper left hand corner of the frame -- something many owners have been reporting and a flaw confirmed by review sites such as DPReview. Toronto-based artist Kyle Clements wanted to test this himself, so he bought a new D600, pointed it at a white piece of paper, shot 1000 frames, and created the time-lapse video above.
We tend not to get too excited about sensor dust problems at LensRentals; we clean sensors on every camera after every rental, so it’s just routine. When we started carrying the Nikon D600, they all arrived with a fair amount of dust, but that’s pretty routine, too. Manufacturing and shipping can be a dusty experience.