Why the distortion on the water tower in my pics?

[MassGuy]

Distortion might not be the word but I can't think of what this is called. Why are these lines only on the water tower in my pictures? I've photographed it a number of times before and have never had a problem. It looked the same way on the screen when I was viewing it live.

 

[UpLift Aerial]

Seems like that area is over exposed and something is wrong with your camera and can't handle it?

 

[Wilbur]

Super weird! It almost looks like a green screen effect or something similar. Can't figure out why that would be happening though. Hopefully someone with more knowledge of photography than me can chime in.

 

[Meta4]

Why are these lines only on the water tower in my pictures?

The areas affected would have been the brightest parts of the image.
Except that the lines are vertical rather than diagonal and black, it looks like an over-exposure warning.
But the over-exposure warning only appears on the live view and not on the recorded image.

If it was a problem with the sensor, you would expect it to be constant and not vary from shot to shot.
So it's a mystery to me.

 

[MassGuy]

I made sure all of my firmware is up to date. Settings are on auto. Same problem today.

 

[With The Birds]

Zoom in to the pixel level- you may be amazed to see that what look like lines are composed of sections of the image that should be somewhere else. I had that issue with a P3P and DJI replaced the camera (after blaming my SD cards and viewing software initially).

 

[MassGuy]

I flew back to the water tower then tried a bunch of settings including custom. I found that dropping the EV down to -1.3 eliminated the zebra lines but the pics are to dark.

 

[MassGuy]

I came across a thread on the DJI forum (Over Exposure Warning Setting (Zebra stripes) [SOLVED]). The OP was having the same problem and fixed it with this -

[Solved: After trying a variety of setting changes, I found that having the Custom Style setting for Contrast at a -2 or greater (-3, etc.) prohibited zebra stripes from appearing during over exposure. Solution was to reduce to a value above -2 (-1, 0, etc.)]

I tried that without success. I'm wondering if it's a firmware problem and not the camera. The OP had a good point in one of his posts. I've experienced this - DJI support does nothing more than follow a script; downgrade/upgrade, if no resolution, then send in for evaluation.