Problematic Nikon D700 Sensor

I just have all the luck don’t I?

The latest consumer electronic of mine to begin its supposed spiral downwards is quite possibly one of my most loved.  Over the last few months I have noticed a truly bizarre pattern show up in my photos.  I’m not sure if they are in all the photos or random but it does show its evil little head somewhat regularly on photos with solid colors.

Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

Click to view larger version

It’s almost like a fingerprint right on the sensor.  The image on the far right is the most zoomed in and adjusted to better illustrated the problems.   In it you can clearly see horizontal stripes across the chair back as well as uniform, circular stripes in the green and grey.

Columbia Photo’s authorized Nikon repair tech said he had never seen something like this the Nikon USA rep that I talked to today said he had never heard of the problem.

Here’s where things get unfortunate.  December 22 I fly to Paris.  December 27 I’m in London, then back to Paris, then Bahrain, then Saudi Arabia, then Germany and then back to the USA January 12.  Fun trip right?

Except, the warranty on my Nikon D700 ends January 8, 2010.  The soonest they could get my camera back to me, if I sent it out tomorrow, is around December 22.  That’s too late.  I absolutely have to have this camera on my trip!  Pedro at Nikon said if I reported the problem and sent in examples via raw files before the warranty expired, they would extend the warranty period until I can get the camera fixed.

Phew.  Now let’s just hope they keep to their word.

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iMac, Dead, Dying or… ZOMBIE!!!

Cheers

Cheers

If you were paying careful attention to my Twitter stream, you might have noticed a few to dozens of tweets about my iMac.  It’s had a rough year.  First it got bugs stuck in the screen…

And of course, there was the screen going bonkers, which was in no way connected to the bugs (it preceded the bugs)

This is the problem that no one seems to be able to solve.  Open any image in any photo editing program and make a marquee or crop selection.  A few seconds latter the screen goes crazy, this is a mild example.  Had I waited and taken a picture a few minutes later, the entire screen would have grown to look like the top of that image (which should be a picture or like a cup of coffee or something.)

The fact that taking a screen shot (using Skitch) picked up the problem is really interesting to me, seems like if it was outward delivering hardware issue (video card), it would show up wrong on the screen but correct on the screen shot.  An example would be when the video card of my MacBook Pro overheated

I ran my tests and everything was kosher.

So I brought the computer to MacXperts.  They have so far, over the past 5, yes FIVE, months, replaced the screen, the video card, the ram, the motherboard and the hard drive.  The computer has been reformatted more than two times and yet the problem continues.

It’s still at MacXperts…

And I actually JUST got a call saying they found the solution… wow. So Never asking what you think… of course they thought they had it figured out like four times already so… thoughts?

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Cupertino, We Have a Problem

Ok. So first.  My bad.  I dropped my iPhone from the SUV my mom was driving onto concrete… about a four and a half foot drop, the top of the phone slamming into the concrete.  This caused the power button to get jammed down and, well that sucked.  So I got a knife to open up the phone a bit which let the button out, though it still isn’t perfect, and allowed me to use my phone.  It is really delicate now though, squeeze it and it will turn off.  Squeeze it again and it turns back on.  You have to squeeze it really hard… perhaps this would be a good thing to patent? haha

I’m not too bent out of shape since I was thinking I would be getting the new 3G iPhone once it comes out and it wasn’t until a day later until I noticed something else was broken…

It appears something awful happened to the camera too.  Guess something is a bit loose.  If I squish the front to the back, it will fix the camera and take a regular picture.  However, if I squish from the left to right, it will turn off.  Seriously, I gotta patent this shit!

So it’s official.  My iPhone is halfway dead.  The solution is a series of squishes and non-squishes.  How awesome is that?

My poor cousin over there looks quite scary.  I’m thinking that I might have also tapped into some sort of super secret easter egg of the iPhone… thermal photo imaging.

I am pretty sure I’m ready to take on The Predator!  Thoughts?

Next up is this one.

I was working on a couple of pics in Photoshop and Aperture, all raw and actually it was about 15 pictures.  The total was about 2gigs of data being manipulated (working on the pictures I posted earlier. Here’s what happened that time around.

I am pretty sure that this is not supposed to happen.  Nothing I could do would fix it and it just kept moving around, flashing and changing colors.  My iTunes kept playing no problem.  It was weird and disturbing and I plan on sending a message over to Apple about this.  What do you think?  Am I Apple cursed or what?!