iSight dead pixel

[deranger]

Hi

I have just bought an iSight. It's an amazing little camera and looks great next to my new G5

But in all the programs I try it with I get a dead pixel in the middle of the display. I've tried it in iMovie, iChat and GCam. Do cameras get dead pixels? Is there anything I can do to repair it? Should I send it back to Apple?

Cheers,

Deranger

 

[stoid]

I've never heard of a camera having a dead pixel, though I guess it's possible. Could you post a few screenshots?

Make sure there's no dust on the lens. j/k

 

[Dreadnought]

I would say that it is dust, or something happened with your lens. Goodluck and show us some screenshots.

 

[technocoy]

wow,

you know mine has that too and i chalked it up to software.... i never thought anything of it as i don't use it a tremendous amount. but now you have me thinking! it was a green dot if it remember correctly. maybe i'll go home and check it out to be sure.

technocoy

 

[Raveny]

I had a dead pixel too, so I called Apple Care and the quickly exchanged my isight...

 

[crazzyeddie]

It is very possible for the iSight to have a "dead pixel" because it uses a CCD (think inverse of LCD, it captures light in pixels instead of displaying them).

A custom-designed, three-part lens consists of two aspherical elements that focus on a 1/4-inch CCD sensor with 640x480 (VGA) resolution.

 

[wide]

i used to have a dead pixel when i opened my start menu (windows). then i reformatted my computer and it went away...

 

[janey]

i used to have a dead pixel when i opened my start menu (windows). then i reformatted my computer and it went away...

thats not a dead pixel. dead/stuck pixels are physical and therefore not apparent if you just take a screenshot of the screen, et cetera.
Sometimes they do just go away though.

 

[seamuskrat]

Sort of true. A stuck or dead pixel on an LCD screen would be transparent to a screen capture. However, if there was a problem with the camera imagining chip (CCD) then the resulting video transmitted to the display would in fact show up in a screen capture.

It is possible and not uncommon for a CCD to have some pixels not work. In most cases, they are off and we do not notice, or it only samples part of the RGB and not all three. But in some cases, its sending erroneous info to the computer or video camera, etc. That seems to be the case of the iSights with this issue.

thats not a dead pixel. dead/stuck pixels are physical and therefore not apparent if you just take a screenshot of the screen, et cetera.
Sometimes they do just go away though.

 

[deranger]

Hey, thanks for the response. Here's a screenshot taken in GCam.

I think I'll just send the iSight back to Apple. I wouldn't mind a dead pixel so much, it's just that it's right in the middle. At the edge wouldn't really be noticeable.

Thanks again.