> The biggest problem we had was with cards that hadn't been formatted that > wouldn't read in the readers at all, though they would read in camera. > The second biggest problem we had was Sony Memory Sticks.
Oh man, non- (or improperly-) formatted cards were a nightmare too, since the customers would invariably assume something was wrong with OUR printing kiosks. On the other hand, we could sometimes get them to pay for an image recovery service, since it was likely their computer wouldn't read their card either. I hate Sony in general (did you hear they're dropping their monitor line?), but the memory cards I had the most problems with were Smart Media and XD. The reason was twofold. First, if something bad happened to one of those cards (which only Fuji and Olympus use, I believe) and they could not be read in any of the usual ways, kiss your photos goodbye. Even our best file recovery software would fail most of the time when trying to access damamged SM and XD cards. CF and SD, for whatever reason, are a hell of a lot more forgiving. Second, if a customer accidentally formatted their SM or XD card, there was no recovering anything. Olympus cameras, especially, run a full format when you format your card, meaning *nothing* is left. I don't understand why they do it this way, whereas cameras that take CF or SD cards tend to perform quick formats, leaving the data to be overwritten or recovered later. John -- http://www.neovenator.com http://www.cafepress.com/neovenatorphoto -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
