New camera - new card ?

Reminds me of a building contractor in Jamaica. When he made some money, he bought a Merc, and every Saturday drove to the service station and said: "Change the air in the tyres."

He didn't like to drive on used air.

G

Agreed. Cards are formatted to a Microsoft standard and any incompatibility would indicate a problem. Constantly formatting them may mask such a problem.

If you had to format them every time you put them in a camera, then you would have to when you put them in a card reader, which would somewhat defeat the object of the exercise.

I believe SD cards are rated from 100,000 to 1,000,00 writing action per sector. I don't need to tell you the most cards will probably out live us even if we fill them daily and reformat them

Well - just ordered up 2 new cards [ Lexar 4GB ] and a new Card reader [ also Lexar ] coming from 7Day Shop.

That should keep me going for a year or two

www.dropbox.com - free online 2gb storage which is really user friendly. I've got a copy of anything really important on there as my third backup.

... but do you know it's secure?

I'm not sure I understand your point.

I always format my cards when I put them in the camera.
The card reader reads them just fine.


TT Not moving on from BBA to CBA are you?

When I'm away I download to an image tank and from now to my netbook. I don't delete the photos but put the write protect on the card once it is nearly full. Only if I run out of card space do I clear one.

At home a download everything after a shoot and format the card.

I own 3 4Gb cards, and reluctantly had to buy an 8Gb last year in the US since they didn't have any 4Gb cards in that particular Walmart..

Nah I haven't got CBA my original cards were sort of teeny ones from the old cameras - biggest was a HUGE 1 GB one

I got the 8GB with the K-x and got 2 PNYs for the Kodak and then discovered that it couldn't cope with SDHC Cards - so they were here and sort of spare - so got used in the white P70 [ well 1 did ] till it was filled up .

My aim is to have a spare card for each camera [ bit like batteries ]

I'll be standardised on 4GB cards now . Good idea about the Write Protect though - that had not struck me

.

Hi Gwyn - my point is that if there are differences between the disc read write mechanisms of one camera and another which require the disc to be formatted, you would have to make the same assumption about a card reader.

The truth is that a lot of this formatting is a throwback to the days when discs were read by mechanically moved heads which had to be extremely accurately positioned. It was not unheard of for a disc to work in one drive but due to tiny differences between one drive and another, a second drive would not read it.

I have swapped a 2Gb CF card between Pentax, Minolta and Nikon with images from all cameras on the same card. No read write issues? Card reader shows all as proprietary jpgs.

Regards

Oggy, as a computer operator from the days when 128K filled a room the size of a school gym, I can't say I remember any of the disks being so temperamental between different drives.

I really can't see why formatting in camera would cause a problem with a card reader. I read my cards on my home computer, on my netbook, on my image tank and via a stick cards reader on my husbands laptop, never had a problem.

He in turn has used an SD card from his old Canon P&S in my old Ds and his new K-m without ever formatting it and has been able to download all the photos from all three camera successfully.
He has since formatted it without problems, and continues to use it.

I think that's the point he's making, a lot of people insist that you need to format the card in camera to ensure compatibility. If that was the case, then you should have to format the card for compatibility with any device.

I've only encountered problems like that with an old camera, and that's because it used a proprietary format, and that wouldn't even read in card readers as a result.

Ok. Well I don't format new cards in camera, only when I put an old one back in.

i generally only ever format if i get a problem with a card. some cards need formatting when you first use them others dont. all i have is 2 cards, 8gig in the k-m 16gig in the k-x, if i had to swap around i'd just swap them. i cant see the need for loads of cards.

Thanks Road Dancer - That's exactly what I was saying.

Gwyn - on my first computer the memory was in glass vessels and had 300V on it. On My first digital computer, a Honeywell IIRC, 16K of memory was the size of a kitchen drawer, and with a bit of maths, you could point out the "doughnut" that was at fault.

Initially I bought a Sandisk Extreme III 4Gb card with my K20. I formatted it when I got to that point in the destructions. That was nearly eighteen months ago and it has been formatted once since. I ought a second similar card and formatted it once. Both work perfectly.