I don’t know anything about the underlying technology in my CF cards. I do know that deleted or erased images leave residual “traces” in the card memory and that reformatting the cards (using the camera’s “reformat” command) appears to remove the residue, leaving me with a “clean” card.
How harmful or potentially harmful the residual data is in a card that has been “cleared” by deleting or erasing images, I don’t know. It makes me uneasy to leave it there.
I do know that people who I come in contact with who delete or erase their cards to make space for new pictures seem to have more lost- or corrupted-image data issues than those who reformat their cards to clear them. The professionals I work with invariably reformat their cards after uploading to a computer hard drive.
To me, the whole routine is commonsense simple (but perhaps I am a bit anal about this stuff). I’m an old wet darkroom guy, and find an analogy there.
For example, I always washed film processing tanks, reels, thermometers, etc. after they were used, so they were free of chemical contaminants and ready to go for the next run, no question about it. The time this took was minimal, and working with clean equipment on every film processing run was a step toward quality assurance.
Today, my cameras (Nikon D1H and D2Hs) will reformat full 2 GB CF cards in less than 15 seconds, start-to-finish. The cameras are set up to do this very easily and efficiently.
Mrs. Grumpy’s Fuji FinePix P&S will reformat its xD(M) cards in a comparable amount of time (but I had to do some menu searching and head-scratching to figure out its “format” command procedure – which buttons to push). I run the card formatting procedure after uploading her photos to the computer system (because Mrs. G. won’t). If I don’t do that I likely will be uploading today’s photos from her camera again tomorrow, or next week.
One precaution I do take before reformatting the memory card is to confirm that the data transfer from card to hard drive has been successful. This seems like a no-brainer, but … .
As noted in an earlier post, above, I use Sandisk CF cards and have been impressed with their performance. The last cards I purchased were 2 GB Extreme III – the package for each card included a mini-CD with image recovery software (RescuePRO 3.2). I haven’t used the software, and hope I don’t have to.
I use a Sandisk “Imagemate 12-in-1” reader to upload image data to my computer hard drive. The unit accepts 12 different memory card types, costs about $30 (B&H Photo-Video, uses a USB 2 connection, and will copy the contents of a full 2 GB CF card to my MacBook hard drive in about 2 minutes (more-or-less -- I’ve never actually timed it). A firewire connection would be faster, and one day I may get a card reader with that type of interface.
B&H lists more than 50 card readers ranging in price from about $9 to $80. Portable card readers that incorporate a hard drive are available, as well, running in price from about $140 - $190. These might be a good solution for photographers who need to recycle memory cards while on the go but don’t want to lug a full computer setup with them.
My needs as a working daily newspaper photog probably don’t match up very well with those of most hiker-photographers, all-in-all. But I do think the practices I follow in respect to handling memory cards are pretty good practices for anyone. They sure work well for me.
G.
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