Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Nikon D7000 firmware update.

Last week Nikon announced a firmware update that is supposed to fix the "hot pixel" problem when shooting video in low light. I've been hearing mixed reviews about the update with most saying it has worked, but more than a few complaining that it hasn't.

Luckily, my copy of D7000 didn't show any glaring problems unless I shot in near darkness (which no videographer should actually do). So I got my hands on a problem D7000 and checked it out before and after the firmware update. My analysis showed that the firmware did fix the problem (on the camera I tested at least).

I'm not sure exactly what the firmware update actually does, but I speculate it's simply a process where the camera maps out the aberrant pixels and fixes them by possibly matching them to the nearest neighbor. Don't take this as gospel though, only Nikon knows for sure and as usual, they're not talking...

My conclusion is that if your camera doesn't show any problems skip the firmware update, and if it does have a problem update it. I might add that some folks are reporting that it sometimes needs to be run twice to fix all of the pixels.

You can get the D7000 firmware v1.01 from Nikon.

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