CF cards and error messages

[DanH56]

The previous thread on CF/xd cards made me wonder if you guys might have an idea about a problem I am having. I have an 8G Kingston CF card I have been using in my nice new 520 and every now and then I get a "Card error" message and end up losing shots. This also happened, though much less often, in my old Fuji 9600. Might this be down to the card being faulty, the capacity of the card being too big, a compatibility issue, or something else? I also wondered if there were CF cards that were particularly suitable for Olympus cameras, I know you get different speeds etc.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted!

[Dogcow]

Assuming you format your CF card in camera on a regular base, is must be due to a faulty CF card.

I had the same issue with a 2 GB card (different brand) and after a replacement the issues were gone.
Nowadays I use CF cards from different brands in my E-3 (sizes 2-8 GB) and I experience no issues at all.

[Ian]

The previous thread on CF/xd cards made me wonder if you guys might have an idea about a problem I am having. I have an 8G Kingston CF card I have been using in my nice new 520 and every now and then I get a "Card error" message and end up losing shots. This also happened, though much less often, in my old Fuji 9600. Might this be down to the card being faulty, the capacity of the card being too big, a compatibility issue, or something else? I also wondered if there were CF cards that were particularly suitable for Olympus cameras, I know you get different speeds etc.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted!

Off the top of my head there was an issue with fast UDMA cards (is it a 266x or 300x card?).though I'm not sure if that was the E-510/410 or E-520/420. Basically, ensure you are running the latest firmware in your camera.

Ian

[photo_owl]

I had a similar intermittent issue with one of my CF cards - I put it down to a card fault.

Faults happen - full card failures I can do without!

[DanH56]

Thanks Chaps,

I think what I'll do is get a couple of 2-4G cards of good known makes and settle on the one that proves most reliable. From what is being said I suspect I might just have a faulty card.

[Jim Ford]

I've got several Kingston 133x ones from here:

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/default.php?cat=6&type=0&man=171&filterwords=&go=SEARCH&comp=

IIRC they have a 'lifetime' guarantee.

Jim

[DanH56]

Cheers Jim

[Archphoto]

I never format my cards, Sandisk 4Gb Ultra II and have never had any problems with them, knock on wood.

Having said that, I don't need verry fast cards for regular photography.

Peter

E410, E520, glass

[Gwyver]

I never format my cards, Sandisk 4Gb Ultra II and have never had any problems with them, knock on wood.

Having said that, I don't need verry fast cards for regular photography.

Peter

E410, E520, glass

Peter,
It is recommended that you reformat your cards - rather than just delete images which have been downloaded to your computer. If you repeatedly delete images without reformatting the File Allocation Table in the card becomes progressively more fragmented. As with computer hard discs, fragmentation means that the writing speed to the card will slow down and, more importantly, in the unlucky case that your card suffers a data corruption it will be much harder to successfully run a file recovery program to retrieve the images from the card.