The number and relative location of dead and substandard pixels in a given chip will affect the completeness, reliability, photometry, and astrometry of the survey. Many of the problems due to dead pixels will be aliviated by the planned frame overlap strategy for the survey scans, but places where dead pixels coincide can cause degradation of survey quality.
This memo outlines methods that have been used for determining what pixels should be masked off for a given chip and also determining what the effect of a given mask is on down-stream processing and data quality. Suggestions are also made for possible methods of evaluating the quality of prospective survey camera chips.