Canon EOS 5D Mark II suffering from black dots and banding noise

Camera enthusiasts who went out and bought Canon’s latest EOS 5D Mark II have been disappointed to find it is suffering from two major problems.

The first problem is black dots that appear on the right side of point light sources when an image is taken at night. You can’t see the dots if you review the image on the camera, but if you enlarge it on your PC or by having prints made then they are clearly visible.

The second problem is vertical banding noise. This occurs only when you are recording in sRaw1 format and depends on the settings of the camera. Canon has setup a support page explaining the problems in detail and suggesting ways to reduce the banding issue.

At the moment they are still looking into what causes the black dots and will post their findings as soon as they figure out what is wrong. In the meantime owners should refrain from shooting night shots if possible.

Read more at the Canon support notice, found via PC Pro

Matthew’s Opinion
I’m sure Canon are hoping that this is something they can fix with a firmware update. If it isn’t then this could be a very expensive recall for the company depending on what it has to do to solve the problem in the cameras.

In their testing before the camera was released you would think the issues would have been spotted, especially the banding problem. The black dots may have been missed because the tests just checked the images on the camera and not via prints or a PC.

One thing is for sure, in future Canon will be carrying out more stringent testing on its hardware before releasing it to the public. This incident may turn out to be costly, but also hurts their reputation as a quality camera manufacturer.