Dead Pixel on digital camera

Just got back from an amazing holiday in Canada with upto 400 digital pic
between me and my wife.

To moy horror, at first, I thought my TFT monitor had grown a dead pixel,
but under further inspection, the dead pixel is only there on pics taken
with my wifes digi Nikon coolpix camera.

Is it possible that the coolpix has a defective pixel in the camera ? Is
this something that happens with digital cameras ??

The camera is less than a year old .

Thanks

Simon

Ed Ruf wrote:
[]
There are programs available to do this yourself for certain Coolpix,
one I and a few others in this forum have used is available at:
http://e2500.narod.ru/index_e.htm
See Defect pixels map.

Just to confirm that I have sucessfully used cpixmap V0.15 for the 5700
(firmware 1.1) with a USB connection and cPix V2.4 for the same job on a
990 also on USB.

cPix is at: http://www.charliex.net/cpix/cpix.htm

Cheers,
David