Format your memory card in the camera

[Wayne Birch]

Try to format your memory card in camera after each shoot
to keep it fast. Deleting data via the comp doesen't always clean the card.

[fewpics]

I am not sure of the exact method that cameras use to "format" a mem card but at a guess I would say it'scentred on some sort of DOS/Windows based operating system, so when you only delete files, you merely delete part ofthe file name, while the actual contents stay on the card, just like deleting files from a hard drive. In actual fact all you do is knock out the first letter of the file name.. eg..

"thepicture.jpg" becomes " hepicture.jpg" (note the empty gap at the first letter)

and the file table does not read an empty spot and refuses to acknowledge anything is there, so it allows the contents to be overwritten. While this method has proven to be fairly safe, it still means that occasionally faults can occur while overwrting the old entries... Sometimes too, the more files you have the slower it gets in writing them. This can also happen with deleted files,so you should take this into consideration too.

I always format after saving the days shoot...