D600 Dust/Oil/Lubricant Issue discussion/Discontinuation and price reductions

spraynpray

Thanks for sharing your experience Shooter. Please continue to do so if it isn't too painful as we are interested in all D600 buyers experiences - with the camera and the service centre..

[Deleted User]

@ Shootor Exactly how I did it. My break through was, after I was able to clean the sensor with a couple of Giotto blows I started making photo's again, as I always did and stopped making pictures of a white wall with f/22,. My counter now is 17.000, I change lenses all the time and remaining dust free is impossible, or is there anybody who thinks this is possible with a D-SLR, tell me please how you do it.

If there were spots again I good see it on my LCD screen when I take Macro photo's with f/32, but this was also the case with my D300. So I turned to business as usual where dust is always an issue by me.

With the D600 I divided the problem in, Oil spots pile up in the left corner and dust. The oil spots almost stopped after the repair and stopped after the second clean by Nikon service center.

There were always little spots on my D300 sensor with an f/22 shot of a white wall, some of them did not disappear with a Giotto blow, then it was time for a professional wet clean, mostly once a year.

Change lenses a lot and you can do this also, no need for a D600 for this.

PB_PM

Yup, every camera I've owned has got some dust inside from lens changes, thus they needed to be cleaned (D80, D300, D700 and the D800). The question is how often, and how much? After cleaning, most of my cameras would have one or two noticeable spots at F8 within six months and thousands of images made. After a year 6-15. That doesn't like like the D600 horror stories with a large blotch of spots within days of ownership. If you can live with that, and a blower gets it off, it's a good camera. If that much cleaning would drive you nuts, steer clear.

kcummi

Hello all I just bought a D600 so I could surprise my Daughter and regift my D7000 to her. I love it and have not had any issues with it. Now let me also say, I am a mamarazzi so I set it on auto and shoot. How do the issues represent themselves?...............Thanks

donaldejose

You want a small fstop and a light background so try these ideas:

Set the camera to A or to M and set the f-stop to 16. Turn the AF off so it won't be hunting for focus. I set the exposure compensation to +2.0 to insure my image will be very light (not 18% gray). Shoot at the cloudless sky or shoot at a white piece of paper or shoot at a white blank wall. Now enlarge your image either in the computer and look for spots or press the + button many times to make the image as large as possible on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. That little yellow rectangle will be showing you what part of the total image you are viewing on the LCD screen. Move that little yellow rectangle all over the screen paying particular attention to the upper left hand corner. Any black dots you see are the "dust" people talk about and any slightly transparent gray spots are the "oil" people talk about.

If you shoot in Auto you may seldom see any spots even if they are there because your camera is not set to show them off. The spots will be hard to see when the f-stop is f8 and higher (auto will probably try to select f5.6 and f8 most frequently) and when there is a dark mixed pattern in the photo. Small black or gray spots are hard to see on darker surfaces.

Hope that helps. I had not noticed any spots in the images taken by my D600 but when I did the test as described above (I shoot a white piece of typing paper) I could see them. Good luck. Hope you can see nothing. In other words, this is one test you hope you will fail!

spraynpray

'mamarazzi' - LOL!

Welcome to NR kcummi - people with a sense of humour are always welcome!

Msmoto

Mmmm... does this mean I am a mamarazzi and not a paparazzi?

In any case....welcome to NRF, kcummi.

bbarb

lolololo
@mamarazzi, you will give a d7000 for gift to your daughter???!!! well done!
By the way do you want to adopt a boy?????

Smac

Don't know if anyone would be willing to comment on this but found this very nice d600 image while browsing last night. The sky, particularly on the top RHS, shows a few artifacts.
Obvious question really, but could these due to the sensor issue or something else?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonylin007/8430506898/lightbox/

bbarb

I am not quite sure what you exactly mean, but i think that what you are talking about is the oversharpening. This image is way oversharpened, to a point that it is almost starting to tear apart.
The sensor issue is those black dots you see at top left and at the right border, and they are visible even at fit to screen size. If you also examine the image at 100% actual size you will count many of them, and if you look at the sea at the horizon and mountains you will see the oversharpen issue.

Smac

To be clear bbarb: I am referring to those black dots appearing at top left and at the right border. So, you feel these are an an example of the sensor issue?

bbarb

@smac, ok then, sorry for misunderstanding you.
yes i strongly beleieve this is the spot issue. it looks exaclty as the spots on my D600.
isn't it pity? a so great camera having such an issue.
and the guy who has it propably havnt noticed them yet, because if he had, he would have removed them, or he wouldnt have upload the image at all.
did you examine the image at 100% actual size?
do you notice they are many of them?
did you also notice its a f10 image??
can you imagine the shoot at f16 with a deep blue sky??? a totaly useless image.
to me its usless as it is now.

donaldejose

My D600 spots were not as bad as this example. Mine were much smaller spots.

Smac

Yes bbarb, looked at the actual size but even just magnifying the first image shows the many lighter spots.
Don't want to upset all the d600 owners - I really want to like the d600/601 ( because I want one ) but this is not good.

proudgeek

Even more disturbing is that the image was shot at a relatively "normal" aperture of f/10. Who knows what this would have looked like at f/18?

MIkeA

FYI. Just received by D600 from Nikon service in LA, California. The D600's serial # began with 304.The invoice repair included in the box had the following items listed: RPL Shutter mechanism; CLN low pass filter; Checked auto focus operation, flash operation and exposure. I put on a 24-120 mm lens (the newer one) and took about 30 test shots. Mostly clean except for 1 spot near the upper left portion of the image. Couldn't get it off with an air blower (but Aperature's spot healer did). In each image, the spot was pretty much in the same spot. Can't get too excited about one spot. But will watch it and see what happens. My warranty expires in Jan 14 so will send it to LA again if more resistant spots show up.

Sato

Oh @Sato Bring your D600 to the service center, they fix it for you.

I have to bring it in to the retailer if i want to keep my rights as a consumer unless they give me permission to take it into Nikon myself. Which they refused so far (going to give it one more try)
But it's going to Nikon asap.

donaldejose

Just checked my D600 and cleaned it again. Found about 10 oil/dust spots appeared since the last cleaning which was 2,105 exposures ago. One was a big dust spot, big enough to see in a photo before you got to 100% enlargement. Another was a small dust spot. The remainders were very small oil spots which I would not have seen if I had not been looking very closely at the sensor under lighted magnification and then at a 100% enlargement of a white sheet of paper shot with an exposure compensation of +2.0. I have changed lenses frequently but I think about 80% of my new spots were oil from the mirror or shutter and not really dust from the air or from inside the camera. I distinguish between the two by calling the larger black objects in the white photo "dust." They also appear as white specs on the sensor under lighted magnification. I call the round gray semi-translucent objects which appear in the photo of white paper oil spots. Don't know if that is right. I am now at 8,122 exposures with a clean sensor. We will see how long that lasts! I should be checking it again at about 10,000 exposures.

Photobug

I wonder how many of those complaints are cured after one or two cleanings. Bet you get to 10K and find no white spots.

We are on vacation and arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana this afternoon and I went to the largest camera dealer in town. While looking at the D800 I got into a discussion on the D600 issues. He told me they have had a few complaints, some people have returned their D600s, some brought them back and the store cleaned the sensors. This fixed some of the issues and did not fix others. When I probed as to how many he was reluctant to discuss numbers but did say it's less than 10% of their sales. I asked how many were returned and he did not answer the question.

We discussed the D610 and he knew about the increase to 6fps. He did not think their would be any other improvements. That lead to a discussion of the new D5300 and he confirmed the addition of the GPS and WiFi adapters and the Exceeds 4 processor.

Photobug

Great price for refurbished D600....$1,589. This price should continue to spiral downward over the next three months.

http://www.adorama.com/INKD600R.html?utm_term=Other&utm_medium=Affiliate&utm_campaign=Other&utm_source=rflAID021866

roombarobot

Wow, donaldejose, that sounds like far more spots than normal, I am sorry to hear that. It certainly isn't as bad as my D600 was, i had easily visible spots every few hundred shots. Still, I don't think we should be getting oil spots on our sensors.

I started with the method you describe to find the spots, with a pushed exposure. I got advice on the dpreview forums to slightly underexpose, so that the white wall I was shooting was a bit grey. The justification was that overexposing can blow out the smaller dust or oil spots. I found that did help in checking how much oil/dust I had on my sensor. Perhaps that might be of use to you. Good luck!

I have not yet noticed any dust/oil spots on my D800 after 3,000 clicks . With my D600, I would get picture-wrecking dust spots in the sky every few hundred shots.

Just checked my D600 and cleaned it again. Found about 10 oil/dust spots appeared since the last cleaning which was 2,105 exposures ago. One was a big dust spot, big enough to see in a photo before you got to 100% enlargement. Another was a small dust spot. The remainders were very small oil spots which I would not have seen if I had not been looking very closely at the sensor under lighted magnification and then at a 100% enlargement of a white sheet of paper shot with an exposure compensation of +2.0. I have changed lenses frequently but I think about 80% of my new spots were oil from the mirror or shutter and not really dust from the air or from inside the camera. I distinguish between the two by calling the larger black objects in the white photo "dust." They also appear as white specs on the sensor under lighted magnification. I call the round gray semi-translucent objects which appear in the photo of white paper oil spots. Don't know if that is right. I am now at 8,122 exposures with a clean sensor. We will see how long that lasts! I should be checking it again at about 10,000 exposures.

donaldejose

Yes, I too think my D600 is still spotting more than normal and it does make we want to take a vacuum cleaner to the mirror box and just suck out all the dust! My total is now about 30 spots over 8,122 shutter actuations. Having never keep track of this issue before I am not sure how many spots are "normal." But I do admit to being super sensitive to it and have never done the same detailed examination of any other camera sensor so they all may may have had more spots than I had realized. When shooting the white paper and examining the image on my camera LCD enlarged as large as it will go I only saw one black dust spot. Then I took the lens off and looked inside the body with an illuminated magnifying glass designed for examining the sensor. I saw two white spots which I think were dust reflecting the light back at me. Only by moving the sensor back and forth so the light reflected off it at different angles could I see some dull spots which I think was oil. Shooting white paper and enlarging 100% on the computer monitor seems to show spots best. About 80% of the spots I had at this last cleaning I would never even have noticed if I had not made these efforts to see them and my other sensors could surely have been full of them without me seeing them. I don't want to go through all this work on my other bodies. Perhaps someday when I have nothing to do I will go check other sensors to see what I find in comparison to the D600. I had been shooting with my 70-200 f4 and when I took it off I examined the sunken rear element and found two dust particles which I blew off. I don't know if those two dust particles in the lens came from inside my camera body or if the dust on the sensor came from inside the rear of the lens. Also, when I blow off a dust particle what is to say that 100% of the time it leaves the camera body. Some of the time it could be just blown off the sensor and deposited somewhere inside the camera only to return to the sensor later.

So far it looks like I am seeing one or two dust spots every 2,000 clicks and while I clean those out I might as well check the senor at 100% and clean out everything I can identify.

Msmoto

Just fro reference, at 10,000 clicks I cleaned about 70 spots of the D4, then at 20,000 another 30 or 40....Now it has some which can be detected only via post processing to find them...mainly increasing the contrast multiple generations.... They do not seem to show up in everyday images....

So, maybe the D600 will clean up after 20,000 clicks.....????

donaldejose

Logic suggests that at some point the D600 will clean up. Consider where the dust comes from. There are only two possibilities: from outside or from inside. If if comes from outside the camera when changing lenses or when air is pumped into the camera by a zoom then it should be the same "normal" amount of dust any other DSLR will experience. I would rule that out because there have been too many reports of too much dust from day one to be "normal" dust from outside. Most likely it comes from some dirty part inside the body so eventually all the dust from that part will have been removed with the frequent cleanings. If it comes from excess oil ejected by the shutter or mirror mechanism eventually all the excess oil will be ejected, cleaned and no longer spot the sensor. So the issue should "solve itself" over time unless the shutter mechanism has some sort of "gap" which allows an air pattern across the sensor which other DSLRs don't have. Then it would be possible that the D600's unique air flow across the sensor will always deposit more dust on the sensor than other DSLRs. If that is the problem Nikon will need to replace the shutter mechanism. Lens Rentals suggested perhaps a "gap" in the shutter mechanism could be the problem and it seems Nikon is replacing shutters on some of the D600s. It will be interesting to see if the D610 has a new shutter and if Nikon offers a free retrofit of that new shutter on D600s.

donaldejose

A little off topic but I do want to post some nice things about the D600 in this negative thread. After cleaning my sensor yesterday I took this photo this morning.

Here is an example of why I like the sensor in the D600. Identify the following three parts of the photo and then look at them enlarged in the link below. This photo was shot handheld at 1/15th of a second at 110mm and f4 with the 70-200 f4 zoom at 100 ISO so the photo also demonstrates the quality of that lens.
:
1. Upper left corner where the wall is faux painted with two very close colors. This is an out of focus area but notice how the sensor distinguishes the subtle colors. This would be applicable to slight changes in skin tones.

2. Middle of the photo look at the bottom of the boat. The only one of these three areas in focus. Notice how the sensor sharply distinguishes the lace on the boat bottom.

3. Ivy covered window at right edge of the photo. Another out of focus area but notice how the sensor distinguishes the pattern of the screen on the window which you can see in the highlights.



Now look at those three parts of the photo in this link to see what I am talking about.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/76080384@N03/9954576546/sizes/o/

See why that D600 sensor is great: once you get all the dust off it! I happen to think that lens is also quite impressive. This can be a really great camera and would be a fantastic buy as the price drops. I see a deal on the NR main blog today which essentially nets you a D600 body for about $1,000. The 24-85mm lens in the package normally costs about $600 so when you deduct that you are left with spending $1,000 on the body.