A cautionary tale...

CWSkopec

Let me start off by saying, I'm an impatient person, I don't like to wait for things I order on the internet to arrive. As such, instead of buying a 4gb SanDisk or Lexar compact flash card from Amazon, I went to the local electronics superstore and picked up a RiDATA card for roughly the same price of either the SanDisk or Lexar would have been online. I had the camera waiting for me in the car along with a new lense and some new filters and I went straight out to shoot and have some fun...

It should have been an awesome day... should have been. I arrived at a nearby mission (Mission San Diego de Alcalla for any local folks), popped in the new card, put on the new lens and went at it. Roughly 350 shots later it was time to move on to the next locale. When I got there and turned the camera on... "CF card error. Replace card" shows on the LCD screen. I didn't panic, I just popped in another card and took my shots.

I got hom, slipped the new card into my reader... nothing... it recognizes that something's there, but can't read the card. All the shots... lost. :dunno

So I return the card and exchange it, thinking it's just a bad card. Later on last night I headed down to Mission Bay here in San Diego to catch some shots of the nightly fireworks put on by SeaWorld and the reflections of lights across the water.

About 250 shots later it's time to head to a friend's birthday party. I bring the camera in to play with getting portrait shots for the first time. Turn it on and what do I see? "CF card error. Replace card." :cry

Moral of the story? If you want to keep your shots, avoid RiDATA CF cards and order SanDisk from Amazon... mine will be here by Wednesday and next Saturday will be all about replicating the shots from yesterday!!

~Chris

Zanotti

Did you in camera reformat before you started?

Seems like a file corruption error......




Anyway, sorry to hear - I buy only Sandisk!





Z

Tommyboy

That's a tough lesson and I'm sorry you had to go through it. Regardless of the price, any flash card sold new should work, at least initially.

By buying a card at the store that was the same price as a card online, you were comparing apples with oranges and wound up with lemons. Clearly, in hindsight, the choice would have been to bite the bullet on the price and get a Sandisk at the store or be patient (that's a big problem for me, too) and wait for one to be shipped to you.

I always calculate the considerable value of my time in the equation. Am I willing to wait one week to save $10 or $15? Not at what I'm paid per hour. The only way to resolve value and patience is to play W A Y ahead.

Again, sorry that you had to endure this. Thanks for helping us with your cautionary tale.

nightowlcat

I realize that it's too late now to recover those files, but a coworker called me Friday in a panic(which was my day off), she'd plugged her xD card into the PC and it apparently killed off all the pictures she'd just taken. After trying a few freeware solutions, she recovered her pictures using this:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/mjmphotorecovery.html

claudermilk

Chris, do you guys have Costco down there? They have pretty good prices on SanDisk cards.

Photoskipper

I encountered similar problem before.
1. The 2G Scandisk card recorded only 30 Raw picture and showed full. On the LCD in the 5D, there is no other files in the card. On the laptop, there was some corrupted files took up more than 1 G space. After downloaded the last 30 files, I reformat the card and it runs smoothly for the next 1 year till now.
2. I made a big mistake in China. Just found a 8 G thumb drive in 2005 at US 20 only. At first I just wonder how it worked, the seller read the drive property from his laptop, showed me the download and readable data from the drive. I finally bought it and tried in the hotel room. It saved the 8 G data but not readable. The files and folder were there but just appear on and off.

After that I trust only the original cards direct from the authorized dealer.

Sorry to hear your story. In future, just try out the card first before use it for any projects.

CWSkopec

Thanks
Thanks for your sympathies, everyone! Luckily all the photos I took were local and I can easily get back to the locations I took them. Last night I reshot the night photos from Saturday and this Saturday will be the afternoon shots I lost. I was bummed, but it's a good lesson to learn eventually and an even better one to learn locally!!

~Chris

P.S. The SanDisk card should be here today, so I guess patience would have been the best option in the first place!