I was in Botswana recently when I moved raw images from a card to my computer in my tent and saw that they had clear corruption in the lower half of the frame. As it happens, I had an email message from someone just as I popped out of the wilds to the Internet-connected world about a similar problem, only in his case he was reporting how Nikon repaired his camera.
I want to be clear here: whenever you see the bottom half of a NEF image is purple, or has colored streaks through it, 99% of the time it is not the camera causing the problem. Most of the time the problem can be found in the card, the card reader, the cable connecting the card reader, or the application being used to ingest images. In my case it was the last one: a program I’ve long used had been recently updated and, well, it has an issue now (actually, I’ve found other issues with the latest build of that product, too, which is compromising my trust in their product).
So how do you know it’s not the camera causing the problem? Simple:
- Put the card back into the camera.
- Press the playback button and navigate to a NEF file you saw the problem on. (You’re looking at the JPEG preview at this point.)
- Press the i button.
- Select RETOUCH > RAW (NEF) Processing.
If the camera can process the raw file into a complete JPEG, the data the camera recorded on the card is almost certainly correct. The problem is not the camera.
If the camera sees the same problem at this point, you still have to suspect the card, so you'll need to try other cards and see if you have the same image corruption problem. If you do, the camera needs to go into Nikon for fixing, which will generally result in the digital logic board being replaced, as the card slot is soldered into it. If you don’t see the problem on other cards, well, again, it’s almost certainly not the camera, it's a specific card (cards wear out over time).
The next most likely “image corruption” problem is either the card reader or the application program doing ingest. I ingested my “apparently corrupted” images using another program, Lightroom, and there wasn't a problem, thus I isolated to the application. That has now happened twice in my long history of using digital, once with Nikon Transfer, now with Photo Mechanic.
However, it’s happened more often with either a card reader or cable that isn’t up to snuff. I’ve stopped using the cheap, no-name CFexpress readers you can find on Amazon because of that. Plus I use only USB cables that are certified to current data transfer standards (which would be Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 these days).
Now, on to the email I received from the reader. They sent their camera into Nikon, and Nikon replaced both the digital circuit board and the image sensor in the camera in question. It’s impossible to get Nikon to give more details about why they did that, but when they do that level of disassembly and put the parts on their testers, they know whether those parts live up to the manufacturing standards they should have met leaving the factory. If they don’t, Nikon will replace those parts. Under warranty, that’s free. Out of warranty, it’s at the teardown time and parts costs.
Which leads me to the following statement, which I’ve made several times before but you need to be fully aware of, so it bears repeating: if you send a camera into Nikon for service, they will not service it if you don’t agree to allow them to do whatever it is that is necessary to bring it up to their manufacturing standard. I believe they require that because they’re warranteeing the repair, and if they only did a partial repair, there’s a higher chance for future failure due to part interdependencies. You can’t say to Nikon service “repair the broken Rear LCD but ignore the cracked top plate,” for instance.
In the reader’s case, not only did they have an ingest problem that wasn’t caused by the camera, but Nikon found, upon disassembly and further testing, that their camera did have a problem that the user probably wasn’t aware of. That reader, by the time Nikon had repaired the camera, found that their ingest regimen was the cause of the corruption they had reported. So they had both the common ingest problem and an uncommon camera problem.
