I bought a 2nd hand Lumix DMC-ZS7 this week, and have only just realized that (in addition to some dust that took some work to remove), it seems to have a slightly hot column pretty much right down the middle.
The weird thing is that is only shows up on shorter-length exposures. For example, here is a 1/1.3 exposure that shows it. However, lengthening the exposure to even 1.3/1 makes it disappear. I would have thought that longer exposures would show up CCD artifacts, rather than make them go away. (I do note that the Lumix series seems to do some processing after exposures > 1 sec, so perhaps it’s cleaning it away?)
Now, I did have to disassemble pretty much the whole lens assembly to get rid of the dust, but I was fairly sober at the time and I don’t see how I could have caused that. I took the CCD out today and it looks pristine (as expected). EBay has (used) replacement CCDs, but I’d rather be sure of the problem before I go that route, as this camera has already taken much more of my time than I’d anticipated and is falling out of the bargain category.
Did you notice that the line is curved? That seems to counterindicate a hot column. I suppose the camera could be doing some kind of distortion (or maybe you did in some postprocessing), but that seems kinda unlikely.
What does the artifact look like with a non-black background?
Change the focal length at which you took that sample and see if the curve of the line changes. If so, that might be anti-barrel distortion processing and would indicated something bad on the CCD to me.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s a CCD column and not straight due to barrel distortion correction. (I pulled the CCD off the back of the lens assembly and it still showed up, so that’s gotta be it) It gets washed out in bright light, which is why I didn’t notice it when I picked it up initially.
I tried to find a bad pixel mapping feature ('cause I’m pretty sure the hardware could work around it, and there are other Panasonics that have that), but it doesn’t look like the ZS7 has that.
Apparently a new one is > 100$, but 2nd hand ones are ~25$, so hopefully that works out. Thanks for the help
