Digital Cameras and SD cards

I had ATP-brand cards fail with my R-D1 a few years ago; but I didn't find out while I was in the field, only when I was back at home. The more likely problem is getting carried away and filling the card. I always carry a spare.
 
i always carry spares with me, small & cheap so why not?

the only card that i ever had fail, when transferring images to my mac, was a very cheap kodak card (made by lexar)...i had 3 and threw them all out, even though the other 2 were fine.
 
for cheap, get a media card holder off ebay, i recommend the hakuba brand (thanks zen shooter), take the rubber section out of half of it while leaving the same in the other half. the empty half hold business cards very nicely...and you have space for 4 sd cards and some business cards in a small, light and waterproof case.
 
back alley said:
for cheap, get a media card holder off ebay, i recommend the hakuba brand (thanks zen shooter), take the rubber section out of half of it while leaving the same in the other half. the empty half hold business cards very nicely...and you have space for 4 sd cards and some business cards in a small, light and waterproof case.
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thx, I'll check it out
 
This is a must-read article, which was referenced on the Steinmuller's Outback Photo site. I recommend reading the complete article as it contains other advice and information, in addition to this warning:

Mac users have an APP in their Utilities Folder called appropriately, “Disk Utility.” Equally, Widows users have their Format program. NONE OF THESE DESTOP FORMAT ROUTINES SHOULD EVER BE USED! They can even inadvertently cause complete data loss, if you are not very careful. I would also advise other Mac users should not use the Sony in camera card format option. The proper way to format any SD card, according to the World authority on everything SD, the SD Association (http://www.sdcard.org) you should always use one of the two following applications, to insure compatibility between your A7R and Mac or PC, and to avoid completely data loss similar to the ones I have just experienced.

The SD Formatter utility is available free of charge at the following two links, depending upon your operating system. I can verify that using it will correct and sort out any present SD Card format problems, and return your cards to their pristine clean condition easily & quickly.

Download SD Formatter Utility For Mac

Download SD Formatter Utility For Windows
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kshapero said:
Has anyone ever had an SD card fail on them in the field? Digital is new to me. How important is it to have a spare with you?😕
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I've never had any of my SD cards fail. I've been shooting with cameras that took SD cards since 2004, back when a 128 Mbyte card was still costing in the $100 range.

Of modern cameras, the only one I've heard of that has had customer problems with SD cards has been the Leica M8/M9. Whether it's the cards fault or whether it's that the M8/M9 card reader specs are just a little too close to the edge I cannot say, and I haven't had any problems at all with my M9.

In the 2004-2007 time period before SDHC was released and became the de facto standard hardware protocol (followed by SDXC a couple of years ago), I standardized on 2G Sandisk Extreme and Transcend class 6 SD cards. Still have them, they all still work, but now my standards are 16G and 32G Sandisk Extreme and HP (branded) Class 10 SDHC cards. I almost always have a spare handy, and when I travel I usually have six to ten of them with me. The amount of capacity is now so great and so inexpensive that I don't bother deleting anything until I get back to my home computer ... ten 16G cards take up little space and can conservatively hold up to 10,000 full resolution JPEG + raw exposure pairs. My usual photography oriented travel trip for two-three weeks usually nets 1500-3000 exposures, so I barely use two to three cards.

G
 
kshapero said:
You guys are right. They are super light, Probably could just keep one in my wallet. In the little plastic case of course.
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Not sure I would keep one in the wallet unless u don't use a rear pants pocket.. Too much bending, that sd card may just give up the ghost.

Gary
 
I have had one cf and one sd card fail since I got ack into photography w/ the release of the gf1. The cf was a no name and the sd was a Lexar. So far no problem w/ other no names, Lexar, or scandisk branded. I have been using the 95mbs Scandisk for the last year or two w/o problems.

Yes be careful w/ Sandisk, most counterfeited brand out there. I have even told buy them from well known sources.

Gary
 
I had a Lexar 600x 128 GB sdxc card fail on me. I was shooting raw+jpg, and after copying the jpgs to a macbook air, the card was irrepairable. Maybe the internal card reader on the mac (a 2011 model) was not completely compatible, I don't know, but the card readers on other - older - windows computers work without problems. Anyway, I lost all my raw files after the first day of a fourteen days trip. I had a second (same) card with me, that one stll works after one year and a half, but I don't read it in a mac.

I got a refund for the defective card, which I only had a couple of weeks, and bought a similar sandisk card.

There were some people with similar issues with these cards at the time, as you may trust amazon buyers feedback.

(I was shooting a fuji x-pro, which had some incompatibilities with macs in itself regarding sd-cards. I don't know if these are out of the way now.)
 
My nikons play nicely with some brands of CF cards, spit out errors once every few weeks with others... Once I figure out that a card works well (after a few months) I always carry that one plus a backup... my Nikons, at least, will spit out a CHA error every now and again. If a pin isn't bent, it's a formatting thing. My MacBook is far more accepting, so I can still get the images, but I need a second card to keep shooting.
 
geertvn said:
I had a Lexar 600x 128 GB sdxc card fail on me. I was shooting raw+jpg, and after copying the jpgs to a macbook air, the card was irrepairable. Maybe the internal card reader on the mac (a 2011 model) was not completely compatible, I don't know, but the card readers on other - older - windows computers work without problems. Anyway, I lost all my raw files after the first day of a fourteen days trip. I had a second (same) card with me, that one stll works after one year and a half, but I don't read it in a mac.

I got a refund for the defective card, which I only had a couple of weeks, and bought a similar sandisk card.

There were some people with similar issues with these cards at the time, as you may trust amazon buyers feedback.

(I was shooting a fuji x-pro, which had some incompatibilities with macs in itself regarding sd-cards. I don't know if these are out of the way now.)
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The trick w/ mac and any Fuji camera is read the files off the card. Once the import is complete, put the sd card in your camera as format it.

The Mac OS is putting hidden system info on the sd card that Fuji sd driver sw does not know how to handle. Since I don't have a windows pc around any longer, I cannot check to see if there are any hidden windows system info that gets put on the sd card after the import is complete. But since no one ever complains about windows related problems, it either does not appen or Fuji sw driver know how to handle window system files.

I initially had these issues w/ sd cards and Fuji cameras .. Where the Fuji camera would behave weird (including freeze ups) until I learned the trick of formatting in the camera. I don't know if latest fw updates have resolved the problem, but this is plain habit now..

The normal cause of the hidden files is due to deleting the jpgs or raw files from the sd card using a mac or iPad, but there maybe other events as well. There was a long discussion thread about this on rff about the time the x100 was popular.

Gary
 
MOST IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW ABOUT AN SD CARD: VERY LIKELY YOUR IMAGES ARE STILL THERE NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK. ONLY THE FILE CATALOGUE IS CORRUPTED MOST TIMES WHEN TROUBLE STRIKES. AFTER TRYING EVERYTHING ELSE, REFORMAT THE CARD (SIC) AND YOUR IMAGES MAY ALL BE THERE.

I am coming to the view that we should to some extent be using SD cards more like rolls of film. A bag for formatted cards, a bag for cards with pictures not downloaded. Lots of cards. Compared to film it's still cheap to have a lot of them, like 10 or 20. I keep one type of card for one type of camera or even one particular camera. SanDisk for the X100, Lexar for the M9 and the Monochrom. I format the cards in those cameras and never do anything else to the card except copy the images with a card reader. No deletions from a computer like a Mac. That way lies trouble. I don't reformat a card till I know there is already a backup of the files elsewhere after downloading. Then, with two computer hard drive copies, I feel it is safe to reformat the card.

When should a card be retired completely? I don't know.

As to formatting, I would know nothing of all of this except I have an M9 and used the SanDisk Extreme 8GB card. My son's basketball game was lost after a classic M9 lockdown. A second card was the only way to be up and running once that happened. I now don't leave home without at least one extra card. Back home nothing would read the corrupted card. No program, not even the SanDisk Rescue Pro Deluxe. My HP laptop could not read the card and repeatedly crashed. My MacBook Pro could not read the card and attended to other matters. Only Mac's Disk Utility could even see the card. I reformatted it with DiskUtility in FAT format. Then I could read the card with the Rescue Pro Deluxe and retrieve all of the images.

Some cameras have weird ways they want to catalogue the files on the card. The review of the RX1 I read on Luminous Landscape (IIRC) suggested Sony's system there was daft. But I am currently wedded to the idea that the safest thing is to format cards in camera so as to have the card set up the way the clever, or otherwise, engineers wanted it. This is what I am doing at the moment.
 
Has anyone ever had an SD card fail on them in the field?
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Yes. This only happened once, with a non-major brand SD card for that matter. It wouldn't hold the images, slowly losing and corrupting parts of them..

This never happened to me with Panasonic, Sandisk and Kingston cards, even though I don't rigorously format the cards in camera and delete and move files around through the cardreader on the computer.
 
Do I get it correctly that proper digital camera has dual-card slot? Unless controller acts up, you have 2 copies of same files.
 
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