Digital camera artifact

A strange looking artifact started showing up on the wife’s digital camera (a Sony DSC-W5) yesterday. In regular non-zoom mode, it just shows up as a small dark fuzzy patch in the lower left corner of the image. At full optical zoom it becomes a slightly more defined small rectangular patch:
Digital camera artifact at full optical zoom
It’s not anything on the surface of the lens, and it doesn’t move when the optical zoom is adjusted so I’m thinking it must be something on the CCD. With a flashlight and some image enhancement using GIMP I managed to get these images:
Image enhanced artifact
Image enhanced artifact
Not entirely sure what to make of it. The striations possibly suggest something spring-like. A few hours later, it migrated a little bit higher to the left middle of the screen (perhaps in response to some soft thumping I gave it). Looks like I’ll have to send it in to have it looked at.


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2 Replies to “Digital camera artifact”

  1. actually, it looks kinda like a tardigrade. a squished, blurry tardigrade maybe. sort of. a little bit. it’s kinda got claws and body segmentation.
    i don’t think i can put images in your comments, but here’s a link to a pretty good picture of a tardigrade:
    http://www.astrosurf.org/lombry/Bio/tardigrade.jpg
    so maybe your camera is infested with water bears! have you been stuffing moss in there or something?

  2. interesting. no moss stuffing, although it may have been dropped once or twice at the dog park. if they find moss-dwelling water bears in it i’ll let you know

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