whats the difference

between formatting your memory card and erasing the images?

You should always format the card on occasion. Erasing images may leave corruption that could build up. Formatting will get rid of this. This will keep you at maximum capacity on your card

I think

am_pitbull_terrier wrote:
You should always format the card on occasion. Erasing images may leave corruption that could build up. Formatting will get rid of this. This will keep you at maximum capacity on your card

I think

but i have been formatting my card everytime i need to erase images because it is alot quicker could that reduce the amount of images the card can store because its gone from 120ish to 77 in Large Super fine

That I'm not sure of. I never heard of anything like that. I just format about once every month or 2 and my card seems to be holding the same as it always did. I didn't know you formatted every time. I thought you were saying you never format.

no i always format haha never erase, takes longer hmmm im lost now

This doesn't address the specific subject of formatting often but did provide for some interesting CF reading.

http://www.robgalbrait​h.com/bins/multi_page.​asp?cid=6007

Formatting shouldn't reduce the memory of the card. Not sure why that would happen.

I thought it was like a computer, you don't format unless you have a problem.

I always format. It is especially useful if you use the same card in different cameras.
Deleteing just removes the marker so that the info can't be found. Eventually it will be overwritten because the camera/computer can't see that there was info there.
Formating overwrites the whole card and reorders it into into the tipe of file sustem used e.g. FAT 16, FAT32, QFA, or whatever. By formating it prepares it for use in your camera. Handy in case you have different types/brands/ages of cameras.
You should not lose capacity by formating.

I alway just format the card. And I read somewhere in a digital photography type book that there is no problem with this at all.

i experience the same prob too.. lost 1mb memory after formatting my 1gb high speed CF card... is there some problem with it??

Are you saying that your 1mb card went to 0mb?

Sounds like a bad card to me.

I miss read your post. When you format a card a small amount is used for the file system formatting. You only lost one tenth of one percent of the card. No big deal

Wow, I can see that there's a lot of misinformation floating around.

I'm somewhat embarrassed by my own lack of ability to give a definitive answer, since filesystems are my specialty. Unfortunately, camera manufacturers don't tend to publish papers about the fine details of how their firmware works, so I'll have to stick to generalities.

I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that "formatting" used to have different meanings when applied to older hard drives. This probably led to am_pitbull_terrier's misunderstanding that formatting can clean up corruption. On the G series, it definitely can't. (Nor can it do so on microdrives or other hard drives; they're formatted at the factory. An easy clue is the speed: formatting to resolve corruption takes at least as long as filling the card with pictures copied from another camera.)

With one caveat (see below) the practical difference between formatting and using "erase all" is twofold: (1) formatting is much faster if you have more than a couple of images, and (2) formatting won't respect the "protect image" setting; it'll erase everything even if you've set image protection. So my recommendation is to use full format if you're in a hurry and "erase all" if you use the image-locking feature.

The caveat I mentioned is that any particular location in flash memory has a limited number of times that it can be written. It's possible (actually, fairly likely) that formatting will cause the card to become unusable more quickly, because formatting requires rewriting the same location every time, whereas erasing give the camera a bit more flexibility so that it can "even out" the memory locations it uses. However, the "limited number" is always at least 10,000. So if you format your card 10,000 times it might wear out sooner than if you used "erase all" 10,000 times. (grin) Personally, I expect to replace my CF card with a bigger one long before I hit the 10K limit, so I don't stress out about it.

If you want more gory details, private-message me.