Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Cameras, Lenses and Shooting gear => Topic started by: francois on June 16, 2006, 06:20:42 am
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I received a Vosonic portable device HD and the CompactFlash connector has a broken pin (see photo, red circle). To my surprise, the reader seems to work fine. I checked the transfered files against the files on the memory cards (via another card reader) using MD5 and all the files are identical. I tested many hundreds of files.
What do you think? Should I send the device to the trash?
Thanks for your input.
(http://mail.mediancer.ch:8100/~feyer/books/brokenpin.jpg)
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I don't know the pinout on a CF card, but my guess is that the broken pin is supposed to be a spacer intended to prevent inserting the card upside down. My own CF reader has an extra long pin in that location.
If my guess is correct, you'll be fine as long as you always insert the CF card the correct side up (whichever that is). If you do happen to insert it the wrong way, serious mischief might result, or perhaps nothing at all.
Eric
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our IXUS camera lost that (same) pin one day. the result was that it couldn't read/write cards larger than 256MB. yours might not be displaying the same problem.
in our case, we had to get the camera repaired; a new card slot was installed.
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Eric and Gregory,
Thank you both for your input. I tried cards up to 2GB in capacity (flashcard and MicroDrives) and files have always been copied correctly. The pinout indicates that the broken pin (#1) is a GROUND pin (pinout, memory card (http://www.interfacebus.com/CompactFlash_Memory_Module_pinout.html)).
I'm not yet sure if this could damage the inserted memory card?
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When looking at the pin out I thought it was interesting that the pin in question seems to be a ground pin. There are 5 ground pins and 3 Vcc (Power Pins) and only one open pin.
Seems to me that the designers had a few spare pins and made 8 of them redundant and left only one open.
That being the case it seems to me that everything should work fine as long as you are lucky enough to miss one or more redundant pins or the open pin.
I am a bit paranoid and personally would not use it anymore as I wonder if whatever trauma caused one of the pins to fall out may haved have done other damage of the unseen type.
Robert
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When looking at the pin out I thought it was interesting that the pin in question seems to be a ground pin. There are 5 ground pins and 3 Vcc (Power Pins) and only one open pin.
Seems to me that the designers had a few spare pins and made 8 of them redundant and left only one open.
That being the case it seems to me that everything should work fine as long as you are lucky enough to miss one or more redundant pins or the open pin.
I am a bit paranoid and personally would not use it anymore as I wonder if whatever trauma caused one of the pins to fall out may haved have done other damage of the unseen type.
Robert
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Robert,
I don't know what caused the damage but I just had the opportunity to have a new unit in my hands. It seems that the broken pin was longer than all the others and I guess that made it much more vulnerable. Also, insertion rails seems very short which can cause the card to be inserted a bit sideways.
I haven't really made my mind about this thing but I can use it with SD cards.