To allow a single defect detection circuit to detect a defective pixel of a plurality of solid-state image pickup elements.

A spectroscopic video beam is made incident onto CCDs 3R, 3G, 3B and an extracted image pickup signal is fed to defect correction circuits 20R, 20G, 20B of defect detection correction circuits 5R, 5G, 5B and clamp circuits 21R, 21G, 21B. The clamp signal is fed to a selector 22 controlled by a microcomputer 8 and the extracted signal is fed to a defect detection circuit 23. Furthermore, a control signal from the microcomputer 8 is fed to a CCD drive circuit 10 and a synchronizing signal generating circuit 11, from which a synchronizing signal is fed to an address counter 24 so as to form addresses for pixels of image pickup signals extracted from the CCDs 3R, 3G, 3B on a screen. Then the address from the address counter 24 and the detection signal from the defect detection circuit 23 are fed to a memory 25, where the address of a defective pixel on the screen is stored in a memory 25.