The Deadest Pixel

You watched our Team Talk Videos and and had a dead pixel in full screen, now you want to throw away your LCD screen? Hold your liquid crystal horses! We left the dreaded dot in the upper left corner of our video on purpose! Why? We talked about the story of the dead pixel in our update videos in Team Talk Vol 2. But we want to dedicate and entire article to it now - as a reminder of the importance of Open Source technology.

You see, we could have removed the dot from every single shot pretty easily, but we decided to leave it in. We purchased a small camera to document certain aspects of the AXIOM project live. Our choice fell on a small cinema camera. So small, some might say it fits in your pocket and with a push of the magic button, you are able to capture breathtakingly beautiful cinematic images. The camera was acquired second hand and had no warranty anymore. Still we decided to contact our beloved competitor and ask how they compensate for dead pixels on the sensor. Some background: Every image sensor has dead or hot pixels, it's a natural byproduct of the manufacturing process and as long as the amount of dead pixels doesn't reach a certain threshold its not a problem. The missing values are simple replaced by neighboring pixel values during image processing within the camera so as long as the camera knows which pixels are to be compensated no ugly dots are able to ruin your precious footage. But instead of helping us add the dead pixel to the ones to be compensated in-camera the tech support team advised us to buy a new camera. What a waste.