Nikon makes firmware for astronauts to block cosmic rays in photos
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
I had this feature available on an early 2010's Olympus. They called it "Noise Reduction" (not "noise filter", that's different) and it could be set to off, normal, or "on." On makes it behave like this "special" Nikon firmware, always performing the dark frame subtraction. "Normal" applies some logic based on shutter speed and ISO, and off turns it off completely. Manual dark-frame calibration was also available via the menus.
I'm not sure why Nikon is tooting their horn so loudly about adding (only for people in the ISS) what's been available to earthbound users of other camera systems via a menu item for a decade?
This is things like dead pixels, hot pixels and amp glow.
If a cosmic ray was removed by a dark frame, two cosmic rays would have had to happen, one during dark frame and one during the actual capture. They'd have had to be the same intensity and hit the same pixels. This is probably never going to happen.
As for who this is for? You and I may benefit too with less cosmic ray noise in our photos. We still see them, though we have a lot more information in our photos. You can see them too if you take dark frames yourself. Even if you put your camera in the freezer to avoid most other noises you'll see them
If you put it in a freezer, you can use desiccant or other strategies to avoid moisture-fogging. Or just wait til everything reaches equilibrium?
Freezer, along with being cold is also a big metal box that will help deflect some rays
If instead in space these errors are caused by cosmic rays and can affect any part of the image randomly, and for a limited time only, then this requires a different algorithm, otherwise the camera will eventually be painting out the entire image as different areas get affected.
That all said, I know nothing of the details of these camera firmwares, and they may be doing other things instead. But, I suspect it is not as simple as some comments in this thread suggest... because nothing ever is.
What they are very clearly describing is dark frame subtraction, as they repeatedly mention damage from cosmic rays. Things are not helped by this being a press release munged up by a writer.
"Noise reduction" is where the camera's image processor applies smoothing over different channels as part of all the other processing it does, such as vignette correction, chromatic diffraction compensation, and remapping for lens distortion.
Some but not all of this is bypassed when doing RAW images. RAW processors (especially from the camera manufacturer) typically apply similar corrections automatically, but you have varying degrees of control over this. They're usually better quality due to more computational capabilities, and faster software development cycle vs stuff baked into the camera's ASICs or firmware.
It should also have been designed in every camera to have unique file names. It’s ridiculous they all don’t.
If ever you have a pixel die or get stuck, you can also manually set the date a couple months ahead and turn it off - it will most likely be fixed when it turns back on.
So THAT is that mysterious click-clack of the shutter that randomly appears on my A7S2. I've been putting off sending it in for repair, but now I can completely avoid that. Many thanks!
Do you happen to have a link to some documentation for it?
I personally used this trick twice to fix dead pixels on my camera, so I can attest to that.
For cameras without a mechanical shutter, there is instead an option to do it in the menu, for example : (https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2010/v1/en/contents/TP0003229...)
Maybe because the FX30 lacks the physical shutter, and instead relies on you putting a lens cao on? If so, I'd expect the A9iii to have the message too.
I think if you can see hot pixels when looking at the raw before demosaicing then the dark frame is not applied (which makes sense, since a DNG is supposed to be more or less a sensor snapshot).
If you do not see them after you processed the raw, I think that would just be your software filtering outliers as best it can, since it would have no way of knowing about the dark frame. I doubt it embeds the dark frame in every DNG, would take up extra space and I am not sure the format even supports that, so likely it just keeps the latest dark frame in memory and applies as part of internal pipeline.
On a Sony E-mount camera, the ultrasonic sensor cleaning doesn't do pixel remapping, only the date trick (or the menu option on electronic shutter models) works to trigger it manually.
It sucks, but it is what it is, and it's not too difficult to batch remove dead pixels - if you even notice them.
Also, a dead pixel is not a ruined photo, it’s a minor inconvenience in editing at worst. And every photo I take on a FF is getting edited, the gorgeous RAW output is what I’m there for.
Do you have software that automatically fixes this issue in all the pictures at once? Because as a non-professional I can only think of a very manual approach.
On my old phone, dust made its way into one of the cameras and now all of those photos are forever ruined (or until I find a way to somewhat automate this fixing)
> During this time, shutter sounds will be produced.
[1]: <https://helpguide.sony.net/ilc/2010/v1/en/contents/TP0003229...>
In the case of a reference photo it is closing, not opening, taking a read of the sensor, then opening again.
The shutter, which is replaceable, is normally rated, for 200k-1mm actuations MTBF.
Even taking a reference photo every day won’t truly impact shutter life.
Anecdotally: I have a 20 year old Canon 1D that is 50% over it’s rated shutter life, and that camera was used for photojournalism (used HARD) for most of its life.
My photos are in /photos/yyyy/yyyymmdd/nikon1xx/dscnxxxx.jpg and I've been using this system since 1997
D750 has this naming scheme: DSC_4203.jpg (or nef). Which obviously wraps at 9999.
Z7 has SZ7_1234.jpg - still not better.
Several subfolders don't count, it's the same folder that is important.
To quote Ken Rockwell:
>File numbers have three programmable letters (good), but then an underscore and only 4 digits, so it only can make 10,000 shots before file names repeat. At 120 FPS it's trivially easy to make more than 10,000 shots in just a half hour of shooting sports, and now you have to keep all those images in separate folders because you can't put two files with the same name in the same folder. Nikon needs to replace the underscore with a digit so we have at least five digits in our file numbers. Even LEICA's pokey LEICA M9 of 2009 uses seven digits in their file names to prevent duplicates, and that camera barely worked at 1 FPS.
It's an arbitrary restriction in the camera software. It needs to be fixed.
A few lines of python or a shell script are required to rename them on import
I can see how it is annoying, though. It is, after all, the first of the 2 biggest problems of computer science:
Naming
Cache invalidation
Off by one errors This isn't really a very big deal with newer filesystems such as XFS and ext4, but on older or misconfigured filesystems it can be a serious problem.
With older Linux filesystems such as ext3, a directory is just an unordered list of files.
That it is unordered is important, because it means that the only way for the system to find a file in a directory is to search it from the beginning to the end.
If a directory contains 3,000 files, it will take an average of 1,500 comparisons to find a random file in the directory. But if the directory contains 300,000 files, it will take an average of 150,000 comparisons to find a random file in that directory.
In either case, if the directory entry is not already cached in RAM, it must be loaded from disk, which would add a significant amount of time to the file access, proportionate to the size of the directory. Obviously a small dentry can be loaded faster than a large one.
Thus, it is much faster when you use a more hierarchical directory structure to separate large numbers of files into unique directories.
Also, this issue could also arise even with 2 pictures you want to store in the same folder. (Although renaming is easier ofc then)
I also hate the d4 not supporting nvme cf cards or even snapbridge via firmware
Loaded all my photos as light frames, prepared and loaded a dark frame, turned off alignement, post-processing etc and turned on "Create a calibrated file for each light frame". It subtracted given dark frame from every photo and exported them to 16-bit TIFFs.
It can be used from command line if you want to automate it more or make custom GUI. Windows only unfortunately, but it is open source.
And the title is erroneous. The firmware used the noise reduction circuits to disguise the effects of cosmic rays on the sensor.