Hot Pixels

After having my Nikon D90 for about 14 months now, I've noticed two hot pixels. At ISO200 with shutter speeds less than 1/125, they are visible. Above ISO1600 you notice a few more, but below ISO800 two become obvious.

This isn't a surpise. I was more surprised that there were no issues with any of the pixels. What got me was that apart from taking the camera to a Nikon service centre, there is no way to re-map the CCD so as the offending pixels are turned off and surrounding pixels are interpolated. The Olympus cameras apparently have a built in system, and Nikon have a system that removes such artefacts but this only works for long exposures.

Nikon don't provide any utilities for pixel re-mapping, which considering this would save their service centre staff a log of aggravation, doesn't make business sense. A guy from Russia has written his own remapping software for Nikon Coolpix and is available here, and there was a tool around for a D100, but yet there isn't anything available for Digital SLRs.

I'm almost thinking of writing my own tool for this. The Russian gent has posted details about the protocol to view and perform the pixel mapping here, but it is probably just too much effort. To be honest, if Nikon service technicians already have this, what is preventing Nikon from providing it to consumers, albeit with a more user friendly interface. A simple check to confirm before changing the EEPROM would be sensible for your average user, which displays a zoomed area of a black image before with the hot pixels, and expected behaviour after with the correction hopefully being applied to the correct pixel.

Anyways, I'll keep hunting that someone might have posted the Nikon software online somewhere.