Anyone use Nikon "star eater disable/dark current enable" hack?

[parallaxerr]

Hi all,

I'm about to venture into a little AP using my Nikon D3200 DSLR. A little reading suggests the 12bit visually lossles RAW compression applies hot pixel suppression to RAW data before it's written to SD, which can "eat" some fainter stars, mistaking them for hot pixels.

There is a hack available which disables this called "dark current enable" from nikonhacker.com, has anyone got any experience using this and does it make a visible difference to processed images?

Cheers, Jon

[Davey-T]

Never had a Nikon so not tried this but there was something called "Mode 3" not a menu setting as such but the trick was to turn on noise reduction and take an exposure then when the camera was taking the image to auto remove noise switch off the camera, this apparently got you a RAW image without dark subtraction.

Dave

[parallaxerr]

Yeah I've read that Dave but also read that it doesn't apply to recent models somehow and it's not a method conducive to the type of imaging I'll be doing. I'll be using a wireless intervalometer with short intervals so want the camera permanently powered on.

It's all a bit confusing as there are many conflicting posts, most of which apply to higher end Nikons. Nikon code is not fully understood yet and it's hard to identify what models compress and process in what way.

#shouldhaveboughtacanon

[parallaxerr]

Well good news. I tried the hack and it appears to work. I've gone from 16MB "lossless compressed RAW" bias frames to 32MB "un-compressed RAW" and the colour gradient is different (expected) due to the lack of processing in the camera