D60 swallowing up images.

[kraterz]

I've been shooting a borrowed D60 and a couple of Sandisk 512MB and 256MB CF cards. Over the past two days I've noticed that many of the images seem to mysteriously disappear. At one time it was particularly bad. I was shooting cars on AI-servo in raw mode, and out of a 4 frame burst there was only one image. Couldn't see this while shooting, and shot till the card was full. When I plugged in to my PC, there were only 27 images in the CF card. When I re-inserted it into the camera, I couldn't see all 27 thumbnails. When I tried deleting a few pictures, the same thumbnails appeared again and again, so I knew something was wrong.

Anyone seen this happen before? Is it a camera defect ? It happens sporadically with both CF cards. Fortunately this is not my money, so I can simply return the D60, but please let me know if there's some easy fix. There's a small marathon happening this weekend and I was wondering if I can get the D60 up by then (just to test it out), or should I go safe and use my EOS-3?

[EugeneK]

Does the problem only show up when you fill a CF. I am wondering if there is a firmware bug that currupts the data on the CF when it is filled. The last image might not fit on the CF and overwrite something else - like the directory list, FAT...

Try shooting but not filling the CF card completely.

There is another thread here with similar problems. I have not had the problem, but I use a 1G MD and have yet to fill it up, (and will not completely) before downloading.

What firmware version do you have. Mine is 1.0.2. If it is a bug maybe we can get a fix.
-Eugene

[kraterz]

Filled up another CF to test yesterday. Nothing happened, no bug. Will try again today. Looks like an intermittent problem.

[EugeneK]

The problem might be the way the camera calculates how much room you have left - how many shots left. All the files have some form of compression applied to them which makes them variable sized. If they decided that you have 1 shot left , but the shot you took did not fit, it might cause a problem. For example if they were calculating number of shots lefts as an average of 6.5Mb (RAW), but the last shot only compressed to 6.6Mb, the last 100,000 bytes would go ??? This would appear to be intermittent and would be hard to duplicate. This is just a guess on my part, but I am a firmware engineer and have seen problems like this many times.
-Eugene

[iamhives]

Yes this is a known bug that Canon has a hard time acknowledging.

In my case this happens in RAW with single shot mode selected. Occasionally the D60 seems to jump back a few images and start recording new images over previously recorded images. You can see the discrepancy in the file names and the image shooting time - if you sort by image name you will see the time suddenly jumps bacj. In mu case only happens for a couple of shots and then seems to jump forward to the correct index location. But the result is that several previously recorded images are lost. Some people have a theory that the images are not physically lost but that the indexes are screwed up. However, for all intents and purposes they are lost since knowone has figured how to retrieve them.

Again, in my case this seems to occur when I take single shots in quick succession (rather than using continuso mode). There appears to be no link with how full the CF is. However, I do use 1gb Mircodrives which could potentially contribute to the problem.

Apparentlt canon knows about this. In my mind this is the most serious D60 bug out there - the thumnail bug is annoying (I have it also) but at least no images are actually lost

[WesWilliams]

I have had my D60 for two months now and have taken roughly 3000 pictures. I use exclusively high quality JPEG (no RAW) and a 1GB MD. I have never filled the MD and have experienced this problem one time. I took four pictures in a 3 minute time period. The first and last were there, the middle two were missing. The file numbering was correct (i.e. it showed IMG_2810.JPG and IMG_2813.JPG) but there was no record of the missing '11 and '12 pictures. This was/is very troubling... other than this I love the camera!