Canon G40 Light Issue

[GM171kk96]

About two months ago I noticed that every video I recorded of vehicles at night showed headlights and beacons surrounding by a glow in a square grid like pattern. This never happened before but now it is constant. I am wondering if I changed a setting that causes this or it is a hardware issue. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is causing this?

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

Can you show us a screen capture or frame grab of the hue/glow or behavior you are seeing?

Thanks

[GM171kk96]

Thanks for the reply. If you go to 7:00 on this video you should see what I am talking about.
https://youtu.be/60-z7YZeukE

[rs-eos]

I'm not really seeing what you're speaking of.  Can you post a cropped-in image of the original footage?   YouTube is going to include so much more compression on top of the original captured compression.

Also, the G40 would only be giving you 8-bit 4:2:0 footage.  So stair-stepping/banding (is that what you're seeing?) will be common.

[shadowsports]

Greetings,

What I see looks normal.  That's lens flare / glare.

If you believe this is abnormal. I would reset the camera to defaults and retest.  I don't believe it will change anything, but you can try it to confirm.  

[GM171kk96]

I have tried in the images below to highlight the effect that I am seeing. It's a flare appearing in a sort of square or grid pattern. I have been filming with this camcorder for over 4 years and this has only began occuring the past two months. Usually it shows a nice starburst effect. 

[GM171kk96]

This is extremely frustrating. I'm beginning to think that something in the camera is starting to fail.

I have changed all of the setting in both manual and auto modes and I have formatted the SD cards but I cannot get the camera to record in low light like it did up until two months ago. Can anyone offer further knowledge or assistance?

This two images show what the camera used to capture. (Refer to the flare from the orange beacons).

In contrast to the orange lights in this image which have the sqaure/pixelation effect around them. 

[rs-eos]

I'm really not seeing the issue.  Is this perhaps just artifacts from chroma subsampling along with 8-bit footage?

[GM171kk96]

It is hard to show the issue via screenshots. I think I managed to fix it after another reset last night. The before and after image is below. However I am worried about the horizontal flare as this also did not appear until recently.

[GM171kk96]

I reset the camcorder again and the grid pattern came back... Changing the aparture to F3.4 removed both issues which implies there's an issue with my sensor.