Has this ever happened to you!!!

I just shot a wedding this week which i was pleased with, considering i'm still learning. I was occasionally getting cf errors, but the pictures were all appearing on the camera so i thought nothing of it.

here are two links to two jpegs.

http://matthewmangold.​com/img_5503.jpg
http://matthewmangold.​com/img_5509.jpg

these are examples of the images i got, i found out when i got home that 1/4 of the shots in cr2 format where @#$@#. they were all colored and garbage. luckily i had the camera shooting embedding jpeg large, and those pics all recorded fine. (better than nothing,odd, but i'm grateful)

Damn i hate lexar. everytime i use their #$# it fails. anyway, i just want to confirm that this looks like a bad card. I was two busy swapping cards out to notice which one it was. I don't think it was the camera, because these errors show up in groups.

thanks..

Return the card for refund, if that's not possible get it replaced and test the replacement. Make sure you have the latest firmware. Test it throughly before you ever use it again, this looks like a problem that cropped up with an earlier firmware. I'd run the card against a tester program on my PC via a card reader, I think I have a program to do that somewhere.

I use Sandisk and Kingston pro, never had a CF card error once.

Tim,

i dont see any firmware upgrades for the 30D on canon's site. are you sure their are updates?

wow, thats odd. I have never seen that before!

heres what baffles me. the camera showed the images fine after the shot. there was no indication that the picture was corrupt. i am guessing the camera shows its picture from memory, and not the image from the card. after my card filled up, i then copied the images down to a portable harddrive/card reader (which is really cool) for a backup.

i then copy the images from their to my really tiny laptop. since i did all this, i don't know if it is in fact the card, camera, or something else. any insight anyone may have into this would be most welcome.

As far as I know the camera shows you the raw file in jpg mode on the LCD. Dunno if this could look correct but not the raw file bahind it? Strange

well some of the jpeg's were bad, but most weren't. trying to find a good compactflash test program if possible.

I have seen posts about this problem before, though i'd probably have a really hard time finding them. I have a vauge memory that it's a very minor bit of corruption on the image, I think for critical shots it's possible to rebuild it by hand, but i'd not like to try myself.

Your gear list says 20D not 30D, the 30D should be fine. I'd say 99% for sure it's the card. Get it replaced, test the new one. Perhaps test the old one first just out of interest.

When the camera takes a shot in RAW it creates a tiny JPG preview and embeds it in the RAW file, that's what you see on your LCD.

hey thanks tim, i forgot to update my gear list..lol. well i plan on testing the heck out of this lexar. i can tell you i will never buy another if this card is bad. i have had issues with other lexars as well. But never like this.

Kind of a cool effect. Would look neat on an album layout!

I know another pro here in town who has a 30D and she took a trip to vegas. She was using a Lexar 2GB 80X card and when she got home, all the images were corrupted somehow. Exactly how you stated above. They would show up fine on camera but were all jacked up between camera and PC. Oh yeah, JPEG Large Fine by the way...

My Lexar 2gig 80x did the same thing in my rebel earlier this month when I went home to NY to shoot my nieces sweet 16. I ended up having to send the card away to drivesavers.com to recover 500 images. I told my sister not to hire a pro to shoot the sweet 16 because I would do it for free. Free has turned into $350 to recover images and another $120 for a new card and countless hours of family therapy that we're going to need if the images aren't recoverd. . . lol . . . oh well. I'm still hoping and praying that drivesavers can recover the images cause no image recovery software that I tried would even read the card. nightmare !

ouch, well at least i know i'm not suffering alone. I think I'm going to start a Lexar therapy group...lol

I could not see your examples of how the images are bad, but I will say it might not be the card. I have had the same problem a few times. It happened in the following way.

I shoot raw and then save the cards to my Epson P2000.
I then transfered the files from the p2000 and save them to a portable firewire drive via a laptop.
The firewire drive's files were then saved to my desktop.

The files on the cards were fine as also were the ones on the epson.
The files on the firewire drive and desktop were corrupt.

I believe it to be in the transmission to the portable drive when just being passed through the laptop.

The files sometimes are able to be seen on some software but unable to be opened.

Hope this might shed some light.

that's interesting. i did have that thought as the last batch that were bad on the computer were still on the card, and looked fine on the card, but not the computer. What's throwing me off is the entire CF card error i was getting on the camera. i got this error multiple times. i simply pulled the card out, and put it back in and all was well.