Justin, I've seen those threads recently however I have one question I'm curious about. In the 30% of pictures that do show banding, does NeatImage or anything else help clean it up? I've heard some people say yes and some say no. just curious as to your take on that.
Nope, neat image does not clean up the image. Someone over at dpreview wrote an action for photoshop that recognizes the banding and it seems to work fairly well, but it's a hassle to use.
Send it back to Canon. Clearly a defective body.
And as far as everyone sending their cameras back to Canon, I don't really see the point if there is no fix. Again, everyone who has fired the internal flash on a long exposure has gotten very bad banding in dark areas. I believe this is the only consistent way to check for banding and if there were people who did this test and did not see any banding than I would say that we all have defective cameras. However, most think it is a design flaw with the camera and not a defect.
EJ Peiker had the same problem with a brand new 1Ds-II. He returned it and the next one was just fine. I'd sure try sending it to Canon rather than just giving up. Be sure to send a sample image with the camera.
I was so set on buying the 20D this december and this is the only thing that has given me pause. I don't plan to take many long exposure shots, but as others have noted the banding can also occur on other types of shots (including high ISO ones). I guess I'm kind of in a holding pattern right now hoping that something can be done about it. Looks like a hardware/design issue though so I'm not sure what I will do. . . . .
jdee wrote:
However, many people, including myself, have noticed banding at iso 800-3200 quite frequently without firing the flash. Whether this is caused by the focusing motor in some lenses, or some other interference is not really known, but I get banding in about 30% of my iso 1600 if there are dark shadows.
This banding has nothing to do with the quality of the file or whether the picture is taken in RAW or JPEG. Those who have spoke to Canon so far have not gotten an expectable explanation for the cause, and I have not heard of anyone who sent the camera back for warranty with success.
All of us who have this problem would love to have a solution surface, but so far we are still waiting......Show more →
Count me as one of those affected, too. My issues are exactly as Justin describes them. Maybe 25-35% of my ISO 3200 shots are affected, regardless if it's RAW or JPG (although admittedly I haven't shot much RAW in the past couple weeks). It has nothing to do with the internal flash. Here's an example... this is the upper left corner, cropped, then downsized:
Settings are as follows: ISO3200, Av, zero compensation, no flash, Sigma 100-300/2xTC, Manual focus, Parameters: B/W, 2/5 contrast, 4/5 sharpness, red filter, toning effect off.
I was just playing around with converters and decided to play with B/W mode, but it occurs at "average" focal lengths and with other sets of parameters.
I would consider returning it, but I want to hear a success story before I go that far.
