Camera or Card problem

[tom l]

Things were acting very odd tonight while shooting a theater event with my 40D.

After shooting a little while I first noticed the number of exposures remaining

on the card had shot up dramatically from 150 or so to just over 300. I then

noticed when I would scroll through the images to review, sometimes the last

image shown was not the last one taken, in fact it looked like a good bunch of

images taken had disappeared. I turned the camera off and back on, scrolled

forward and backward and lo and behold the missing pictures were there again.

This happened again sometime later and I swapped out the card with another and

finished the show. No problems with the 2nd card but didn't really have it in

very long.

 

When I got home I found there were two folders the images had been placed in,

the earlier pictures were in the higher numbered named folder and the later

pictures in the lower numbered folder (weird). I copied all to my hard drive

and can see a gap in the numbering (all were between 725 and 958 but sorted by

file name I noticed a big gap between IMG_0788 and IMG_0889. I then sorted by

time and found the numbering sequence alternated from 700's to 900's every 10 to

20 images.

 

What could be happening here? Does this sound like a card problem or a camera

problem?

 

Thanks,

Tom

[m_barbu1]

Did you delete any photos at any time? Did the light conditions (or settings on the camera) change at all during your shoot? Number of remaining exposures is "constantly" calculated based upon the variables at that time. Just by changing the ISO, I can reduce/increase the number of photos I can take drastically.

[tom l]

No, this goes way beyond the variations that occur when ISO or lighting changes occur. It also doesn't explain why the crazy numbering took place, it kept jumping back and forth.

[colinsouthern]

Hi Tom,

 

Very hard to know what's going on.

 

Perhaps do a complete reset of the camera and try to use other cards - and see if the problem reoccurs?

 

I've had a batch of images go missing from a low-quality card once, but nothing quite like you've described.

 

Was the card formatted in the camera? Is there a possibility that the card is one of the many many fakes floating around the likes of eBay?

 

 

Cheers,

 

Colin

[bill.akstens]

Maybe a problem at the CF card-to-camera connector interface with your first card. Perhaps an address pin or pins got stuck or flaky, causing nonsequential writes to the card? For example, if the second address bit got stuck Perhaps you can carefully examine all the connector pins in the camera and on the CF card with real good lighting and magnifier to see if everything looks normal?

[mr._b]

I suspect it's the card. I experienced somewhat similar symptoms with a bad card in a 10D last year... the 40D may handle bad cards differently though, the bad card frequently crashed my camera.

 

btw: Sandisk replaced that card with a new one after an RMA request.

[tom l]

Thanks all for the comments. FWIW it has also been suspected that an update of the firmware to 1.0.5 (mine is at 1.03) might help as there was a comment in the release notes regarding a rare skipping of file numbers and it supposedly fixes the black image I saw. It would not necessarily address the back and forth skipping I experienced but is worth a shot.