New problems reading image files from CF - could it be the camera?

[jfaughnan]

I have been having intermittent trouble over the past few months reading image files from my 4-5 year old Canon EOS 350D.

After quite a bit of testing I've shown I can replicate the problem on two different CF cards -- one that's 4 years old (SanDisk 256MB) and and one that's 4 months (SanDisk Extreme III 4GB) old. Sometimes my Mac can read the images, sometimes it chokes. So far I've only lost one image.

I've tried a couple of different techniques to read the images, so I think the problem is either my camera or my media.

I'm willing to buy one more CF card to see if it's the media. One CF is old, perhaps the newer one simply has a reliability problem.

My question is, has anyone ever heard of this problem coming from the camera rather than the media? I use this camera often, but i'm probably under 60,000 images total.

I find it hard to believe it's the camera, but I thought I'd check.

[degrub]

If you can get your hands on a CF reader and plug it into the Mac, that might give you some more information.

[John.Murray]

You don't mention whether you are downloading the images directly from the camera or a card reader; have you tried swapping cables/reader?

[John S C]

May seem a stupid question but are you reformatting the card after use or simply deleting the images.

If you are just deleting the images try reformatting the cards.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

May seem a stupid question but are you reformatting the card after use or simply deleting the images.

If you are just deleting the images try reformatting the cards.

And reformat them in the camera you will be using them in, not a different one.

Eric

[Jack Flesher]

Honestly, cards can wear out after several I/O sequences -- and it sounds like that may be the culprit.

[fd3rd]

Interestingly enough I just experienced this for the first time also. I had been connecting the camera, a Fuji, via a Firewire cable. Sometimes, it just wouldn't show up on my Mac as a connected drive. Usually, cycling it a couple of times would work. I then tried a USB cable with the same result. My all-in-one printer has a card reader built in and I've been removing the card from the camera and plugging it into the card reader in the printer with no problems. So I don't know what the problem was but using the card reader solved the problem.

[jfaughnan]

Thanks for the responses.

I had problems earlier with taking the images off the camera, so I'd most recently been using a USB reader (older model).

I have done some testing and its working for the moment with the USB cable directly off the camera. I suspect that either both my CF cards or bad or the reader is bad. It doesn't sound like cameras have read/write issues very often, so I doubt it's the camera.

That's really what I wanted to know -- how often does this turn out to be a camera problem. The answer I take away is ... almost never.

Thanks!