April | 2013 | Art + Photography

Thinking of buying a Nikon D600…..hold that thought. You may want to read the following before jumping in.

Whilst some may argue that the overall performance of the camera weighs in against the inconvenience of the dust and oil issue, I’d have to counter-argue, that there’s nothing worse than coming back with a swag of useful shots and suddenly finding them loaded with lots of visible spots out of the blue and (not even as in my case) be able to palm it off to a lens change gone horribly wrong. And if that’s not enough, conventional cleaning fails to remove the junk from the sensor so the camera has to lay idle until the sensor can undergo a wet clean. Which has in my case now been something like three weeks. That’s clearly not what you buy a camera for. i.e., you don’t go out and buy a good camera just to have a part time relationship with it.

All might be well in the ideal world if the ‘free clean’ offered by Nikon staved off the wolves, but apparently it doesn’t and you can, by all accounts, expect the issue to re-appear in the not too distant future. And then, hi-ho it’s off to another round of clean’n’go.

This is the first time that I’ve experienced visible particles at open apertures. I had a little dust on a Canon 50D which took two rounds of cleaning at Canon in Sydney, but in this instance the particles were sparsely scattered and visible only on shots taken with a Pinhole Cap (f/166) and a f/45 Zone Plate. However on the D600 the particles are visible on conventional lenses at apertures down to f/1.8 on both stills and video.

These two shots are about 30 min apart and the increase in what appears to be both oil and dust is clearly visible. Both crops are from the top left of the frame and are consistent with most other reports. They were visible under magnification in the preview and the lens filter was cleaned between shots to eliminate the possibility of anything foreign on the filter itself.

Also read the most recent post on this here