Horizontal lines through photos?

Danyell · May 19, 2008

Hey everyone.. I'm new here and I'll be the first to admit I'm a complete noob when it comes to photography. Before leaving on vacation, I recently purchased a Canon 400D / Rebel XTi.. In the following days I took a ton of (pretty awful) photos with it and upon uploading them to my computer I noticed all of the images had horizontal lines going through them. I have every intention of taking photography classes at the local community college but in the meantime I'm just messing around with my camera to get an idea of how it all works. So needless to say, the streaky photos were taken on a variety of different settings / indoors / outdoors. The lines occur even using the full auto settings. In some photos it's more obvious than others, but it's always there. Hopefully someone here can explain what I'm doing wrong.. I apologize in advance if it's something really stupid and simple! Haha.. Here are some examples of what's happening:

and a less obvious one:

JimmyO · May 19, 2008

Are these files from your camera to the computer, or are they scans? Because this looks like something wrong with a printer. If not then i would call up canon right away.

Danyell · May 19, 2008

Sorry, I should have specified..the examples I posted are straight from the camera to my computer. So it looks like a camera problem and not user error?

K8-90 · May 19, 2008

JimmyO said:
Are these files from your camera to the computer, or are they scans? Because this looks like something wrong with a printer. If not then i would call up canon right away.

+1

It looks like consumer-quality printer-effect to me... NOT something that a camera should be doing! If these are the actual camera files, call Canon ASAP!

Josh66 · May 20, 2008

What memory card are you using?

Is it possible that the files are getting corrupted by the card somehow?

If you have the software for remote shooting (should have came with the camera) try taking a few pictures with that, just to bypass the memory card and see if the problem goes away or not (or you could just try different memory cards too I guess).

Alex_B · May 20, 2008

This looks like banding (or banding noise) to me (not to be mixed up with posterisation sometimes also referred to as banding).

This can happen at very high ISO, or even more likely if your images were severely underexposed and they were brightened up then on the computer.

What was you ISO?

If this happened at moderate ISO and with good exposures, then your camera needs a repair.

Atropine · May 20, 2008

ISO was 320 on the flower pic and not available on the other two. My guess is that they were severly underexposed and fixed up in some software. I think Alex is on to something. If that's not the case a faulty sensor is what first come to mind.

Danyell · May 28, 2008

I can assure you, these pictures have not been edited at all. Straight from the memory card to Photobucket. The cropped photo with no EXIF data was simply cropped to avoid posting a photo of someone without their permission.

djacobox372 · Jun 5, 2008

Looks like electrical interference... I think your camera needs service somethings loose or malfunctioning.

Danyell · Dec 14, 2008

I know this thread is old, but I wanted to update in case anyone else has this problem.
I ended up sending the camera back to Canon, and there was a problem with the camera. The note in my paperwork that returned with the camera read: "We have examined the product according to your request and it was found that the digital sensor was inoperative. The digital sensor was replaced." It's working 100% better now.