Nikon issued a service advisory today for the D750 flare issue documented by many users of Nikon's newest full-frame DSLR and reported by Nikonrumors before Thanksgiving. The issue happens when light reflects from a small reflective piece of metal that isn't covered inside the body, resulting in a horizontal linear flare in the upper portion of the image when a direct light source is at a certain angle relative to the lens.
For those wondering if their D750 is affected, enter your serial number on Nikon's service advisory website where you can get more information about the issue. For those affected, Nikon will of course handle the shipping and repair job for your body.
On more recent D750s that have been silently recalled or already fixed, Nikon has added a black dot on the inside of the tripod socket to signify when a particular body has had the flare issue fixed.
This issue comes on the heels of other service advisories that have surfaced for Nikon's most recent full-frame bodies, including the D600 for its oil/dust spot issue and the D810's "bright spot" issue. This marks the sixth Nikon service advisory in the last year. Between 2005 and 2013, Nikon averaged just over one service advisory per year, with some years seeing a completely free record.
Nikon hasn't had much luck lately.
Oh man, the D810 has a "bright spot" issue? Darn it! I haven't noticed anything, and I've already logged some 100k shutter actuations on it. People also complained about D4 and its focusing. I must've lucked out with both.
On the other side, I think many gear-obsessed hobbyists on sites like dpreview tend to spend a little too much time photographing brick walls, and analyzing the heck out of their images, peeping over every pixel in hopes of finding a flaw, to which they quickly draw the public attention to.
Or maybe Nikon's QC department needs a new manager.
Probably a combination of both.
I've seen better examples of that defect in action but it is clealry noticeable, as I'm sure the others are. It is also possible some people may not notice something that is there due to their kind of photography.
I doubt that anyone finding a flaw in their expensive camera was hoping they would.
Definitely a QC and/or design failure.
The D810's bright spot issue was in the case of long exposures and/or when using a certain cropped section of the sensor. You may not have noticed it in normal shooting (nor may it have even affected your particular body). In any case, yes, it's good to know some of these things exist so you can test them and get them fixed in case they do come up in your images later, depending on what you're shooting.
Did you guys see the 360 project at CES 2015 where they used 48 Nikon D750's to create a seamless 360?
Here's what it looked like:
<img src="http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/1-20-2015/Gg3itR.gif">
Robert, pretty funny! But this is what the effects actually looked like. We noticed NO flare issues on all 48 cameras.
Glad you enjoyed, yeah I saw 100s of them with no issue, but I still found this hilarious
Although it was most obvious with the D750, what's come to light (no pun intended) is the fact that this occurs to some degree on quite a number of both DSLRs, and even mirrorless cameras (the Leica M 240 is essentially as bad, or worse). You can see some samples over at Photography Life in this article:
https://photographylife.com/nikon-d750-flare-shading-issue
With this cat out of the bag, you can bet that camera manufacturers are scrambling behind the scenes to not only make sure new models don't have this problem, but to be ready with a fix for any existing model should their users start harping the way Nikon users did. In the end, this is a good thing for all consumers and manufacturers, even if Nikon has to take the hit for it.
I'm very lucky with my purchase, my D750 is not affected, but I did wait to purchase it at least 2 months after it was released. It seems that the affected cameras were the first batch only.