Saturday, June 4, 2011

D7000 – Finicky little thing …

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I’ve been struggling with an error message on my new D7000 – Cd Err, which of course means card error. I can often get one or two images on my Patriot Class 6 16GB memory card, but then it inevitably fails.

I have tried slow (full) formatting in card reader and formatting in camera and this just does not work. I am running a full sector scan with CardRecovery as we speak. It is almost done and so far no bad sectors found. Which tells me that the fact that the card works perfectly on the Panasonic ZS3 for movie recording is  not a fluke :-)

I was digging through the web for more information and found this disappointing table of approved memory cards:

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That’s a really short list and only the most expensive cards are on it. Well, Future Shop has a Lexar Platinum II 32GB card coming on sale for 54 bucks this evening, so I think I’ll grab one.

Meanwhile, I’ve just rattled off a bunch of images on the newly scanned 16GB Patriot and all is well. The D7000 seems happy. This has happened to me before with the other brand cards … a 4GB Transcend once became unreadable with all my London Aquarium shots on it. That freaked me out and that was when I went to http://cardrecovery.com to get a solution.

This software recovered all my data in files named file0001.jpg and so on. What was cool though was that the card became readable after that and has been used by me ever since. It works fine. What I eventually found on the topic was that these flash cards can get “stuck” in the wrong state and the scan used by Card Recovery will reset each sector. This has been known to repair cards, and for me it has now worked twice.

So this software continues to be highly recommended by me. It works well and it saves cards form the garbage heap. I just wish I had remembered to run it on my 32GB card from China … I dumped it after getting errors in all my cams. Duh …

Now, I have an A-Data card that got great reviews on Amazon, unlike the Transcend of the same size. It’s an 8GB Class 10 card and it works great in the D7000 so far. So not all off brands are evil. The problem is that it is hard to tell real one from fakes, and even harder with off brands bought in places like eBay.

Update (before I even finished this article): After more than a dozen successful images, the card is again throwing an error in the D7000. This really sucks. They are obviously pretty serious about the approved list … *sigh* …

Update 2: I ordered a Platinum II card at Future Shop for 55 bucks (half price) … 32GB! But Wymjym from the Fuji forum sent me a message that the Sandisk Professional cards are vastly faster, so I poked around and finally pulled the trigger on one of these cards at 16GB size for 69 bucks. That’s a lot more expensive … but the speed of the card is astounding. Triple the speed for shooting and offloading. Should be here in a week or so. I may pick up the one from Future Shop anyway … I have three days to decide and then they cancel it on me, which is fine.

Update 3: I never picked up the Platinum II, as I already have a pair of 8GB Platinum IIs and they have quite slow write times. The AData 8GB at Class 10 is a better value. Faster for less money. And regarding the D7000 … it turns out that the fault lies with Patriot. This is a known compatibility issue with the D7000. Of course, the D7000 could have been more forgiving, but it is not Nikon’s job to relax the specification to accommodate lazy firmware coders. So bye bye Patiot … won’t be buying any more of that brand any time soon …

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