Guy: Every Time You Fly With Your Camera, You're Damaging The Sensor
Rob Hummel, a film industry vet speaking at this year’s Cine Gear Expo, reveals what seems to be a shocking fact about digital cameras: taking your camera on planes kills pixels! The rationale behind this is that the gamma radiation at altitude is much greater, and this causes a voltage change in sensors that can “fry out” pixels. Calamity! But wait, let’s just check some stuff here.
Hummel is probably speaking from a grain of truth: gamma rays probably do excite photo sensors, but the increase at cruising altitude isn’t really that much greater, and a commenter links to a paper showing that either way, it’s nowhere near the levels necessary to damage a sensor. It’s probable that some sensors are more likely to suffer from this problem than others — but any systematic problem would have been detected and corrected by now.
[via Photo Rumors and PetaPixel]