Sandisc SD

I am not surprised that you haven't had any problems. The whole point about 'eject the hardware' is to take into account disk caching. I once turned off a 300Gb USB hard disk without ejecting and when I switched it back on I got a message that it was corrupted (the cache had not been flushed to disk). It turned out that I hadn't lost anything, but it took something like 2 hours to perform a chkdsk on the disk.

In general, you will not be writing to the SD card from the PC, so any caching on the PC will not affect the SD card. So I cannot see why you would have to eject the SD card. But it doesn't do any harm.

Richard

You also need to bear in mind that software such as virus checkers or spyware detectors may be running in the background and may be accessing your removable media when you remove it.

Also, in order to speed up access to files, windows may keep recently accessed files open for up to 15 minutes after you have finished using them. You can check to see what is still open if you right-click on My Computer, click Manage then click Open Files.

There are a lot of things happening on your PC even when you aren't doing anything to it, so better safe than sorry. I liken it to changing gear on your car without using the clutch - it is possible, but not recommended! (Unless you are The Stig)

Personally, I regard the "switch off before changing" practice in the same way as shutting down a computer in an orderly way. You may switch off a computer by pulling the power numerous times without any harm being done, but once in a while something goes wrong and you end up with, say, a non bootable harddisk.

I have also found that changing the lens without switching off the camera may result in malfunction, e.g. changing from the DA kit lens to an old manual lens. Presumably the camera reads information on bootup like any other computer.

So my advice is always to switch off the camera before replacing anything, like changing lenses, removing memory card, or even connecting the USB cable.

Best regards
Terje-L

Is this actually true?

Or does the 'charge' arising in the CCD occur only when the sensor is exposed to light?

Several of the articles I've come across describing how CCDs work are pretty technical, and I don't pretend to fully understand them, but they all talk about charge arising due to the incident light, and that charge then being collected and converted into an output voltage and amplified.

I haven't seen anything saying that as well as this, the CCD is charged whenever the device is on (whatever that means).


Another thought that occurs to me is the dust removal cycle. If a static charge is helping to make the dust stick, you'd think they'd remove it before trying to shake it off, wouldn't you?

I would expect that the CCD is actually switched off when the dust removal is operating.