Last night our town had its annual Christmas parade. I took my FZ35 to record it. I stood outside as long as possible, because it started to rain pretty good. Anyway, when recording and then when reviewing the video when I got back home, I could see vertical lines caused by the lights of the various emergency vehicles in the parade. I expected this since the FZ35 has a CCD sensor. What I'm wondering is, would the CMOS sensor of, say, the FZ150 have prevented that?

G'day JayC

unlikely - it is a function of the sensor with the pixels being set in a cross-pattern of rows and columns - and when a bright shaft of light is detected, it is recorded as such

I have had 1/2 dozen different cameras and occasionally have found similar results from time to time

Regards, Phil

Thanks for the reply. Is there anything that can be done to reduce the effect? It was night when the parade was going on and raining pretty good. It wasn't until I got home again, that I thought maybe I could have used the lens hood. Would that have made a difference?

Since I had to retreat to the car because of the rain the video is in two parts. However, the whole thing makes up about 1GB. I'd upload at least part of the video, so I can show the effect, if it wasn't so big.

Here's a down-sized sample from my FZ35. I believe it was generated by the stadium lights at a local stadium.

Can see it at about the 50 second mark of this video excerpt, and again at the very end - vertical purple lines.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24398483/musicmotion072a.mov

Yes, I believe that a CMOS based camera would have avoided this problem as it is a known issue when using video on a CCD sensor. i.e. CCDs displays vertical streaks from a light source.

Whilst CMOS will avoid this, it suffers from its own set of issues though: The Rolling shutter problem.

There is quite a lot of detail avialable on the web on this very subject:
i.e. http://coldstreams.com/video/?p=348

Very precisely, yeah it would have. CMOS don't have that problem.

However, yes it has a million other issues for bridge level cameras so it's a fair price to pray ( :P )

My cmos based camera has not this problem.