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Forums · Photo Gear Discussion

5D Mark II black dots are fixed

Discussion

7 replies
Posted by Andrew Yip on January 7, 2009 at 11:44 PM
Just wanted to let people know that the "black dots" problem of the 5D Mark II seems to be fixed. I hardly ever saw the problem in real-world images, but it was real.

I installed the new firmware, and it looks like the problem is gone:
http://www.andrewyip.com/blog/2009/01/07/firmware-update-fixes-5d-mark-ii-black-dots-problem
Posted by Paul DeCesare on January 8, 2009 at 12:20 AM
Woo Hoo!
:jump:

I'll make sure I post this on my website. Thanks for doing the webpage comparison!
Posted by Gautam Biswas on January 8, 2009 at 12:47 AM
Thanks for the comparison images. However, I must admit, I could not appreciate the black dots in the pre-firmware images. Can you please highlight them with a circle or arrow.
Posted by Andrew Yip on January 8, 2009 at 11:51 AM
Gautam, the black dots appear to the right of the bright lights, particularly at higher ISOs. Here's the 1600 ISO shot with arrows pointing to some of the dots. Hope that helps.
Posted by Scott Fricke on January 8, 2009 at 8:59 PM
Thanks for posting this, I just completed the upgrade.
Posted by Andrew Yip on January 8, 2009 at 11:19 PM
I forgot to mention this in my original blog post (now updated), but I usually recommend waiting a bit before installing new software upgrades, just in case they introduce new bugs. This time I wanted to know if the dots were fixed, so I took the risk.

If you already updated, don't worry...there's probably no new issues to worry about. I'm just recommending the conservative approach.
Posted by Paul DeCesare on January 9, 2009 at 9:43 PM
Andrew, I posted your comparison on my website, and it got picked up and featured by Peter Salvia's website, so you may be getting some traffic. Hope it doesn't max your bandwidth!
:cool:
Posted by Andrew Yip on January 9, 2009 at 11:06 PM
Cool, thanks for the heads up Paul. I was actually hoping this would get picked up by other sites, so I'm happy. I'll cross my fingers about the bandwidth :smile: