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Has anybody noticed blue fringing around bright white highlights on the new 500? I noticed this on a shot I did today of a man in a black jacket sitting in full sun this morning. His face is correctly exposed, there is a white coffee cup in front of him, the cup is surrounded by black and obviously very bright.
The black/white boundary of the cup has a blue fringe around it. The same effect is noticed to a lesser effect on other shots.
Chromatic aberration or CCD problem?
(HJ17 lens on 500. FC set.)


copied from an E-mail from a colleague.
Any thoughts/experience. It seems to be a common problem with the 350/500 judging by the e-mail traffic.
I haven't yet experienced this myself but will keep an eye out for it.. Now we have set up the lens flare files in our camera,
I don't know if this has been done on the camera mentioned above.

Thanks for any advice
Martyn

It's probably chromatic aberration. The 500 shares the same optical block as the 700 and CA is known to occur with the 700. It's a bit of a mystery as to how much is down to the lens and how much the prism. Probably a bit of both Sony will blame the lens, the lens manufacturers blame Sony.

Been doing tests with PMW 500 and CA has me concerned. I am using Canon HJ11x4.7 that I used on my Sony F/900 for years and just got back from shooting with F/800 with same lens with no issues with CA. Now on PMW 500 I'm able to create CA without much effort. I just bought this camera to replace my 900 ( I also own an Alexa). I'm curious if 700 users have been able to deal with this chromatic aberration?

Well PDW-F800, PDW-700 and PMW-500 all share the same sensor block so CA should be the same across all these. If your seeing more CA with a 500 than an F800 then something is wrong as they should perform the same.

Thanks. I'll continue to investigate with Sony.

Hi

Has anyone made any progress on this subject? I am using a PMW500 and have noticed severe blue fringing (sometimes it can look like someone has colored it in with a blue Sharpie!) on high contrast subjects. I would really like eliminate or reduce this otherwise I think we will have to scrap the 500 and use something else. I've never seen it so pronounced.

Thanks

Mark

It's a long shot as it definitely sounds like either a lens or optics block issue. But have you tried going into the picture adjustment settings and methodically reducing the effect of each one in turn to a minimum to see if this has any effect?

Before you start condemning cameras have you tried the same lens under the same conditions on other cameras with similar resolution?

I've had the same blue Sharpie effect that MChan has had. It usually happens in vertical or horizontal lines combined with about 4-5 stops of overexposure. To be honest I think it's a flaw in the block and not a lens issue.
Andre

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. In the end we tried both Canon and Fujinon ALAC lenses and the effect seemed slightly lessened with the Fujinon. We tried returning all setting to default factory settings to no avail. We were advised to switch off the matrix and knee saturation but this had minimal results. I'm afraid I have to agree with Andre, maybe there is a bad batch of sensor blocks? A PDW 700 may bloom and may have some light purple fringing in similar situations but not the hard blue lines we had with the 500.

Cheers

Mark