G3 files corrupted!?!?

Hello!

I'm a brand new owner of a Canon G3. After months of trying to figure out which camera to purchase (sony, olympus or canon) I opted for the G3 since I'm a previous happy Canon owner.

I'm having a serious problem though which I hope someone can help me with. I'm going through my inital 'test' phase with my camera, taking a lot of test shots, and finding that about 15-20 percent of my pictures I take seem to be corrupted when transferred to my computer. When those 15-20% pics get transferred, I can not open them with any program! All the other pictures come out beautiful, and can be opened/viewed without problem.

I know it's not the CF card, since I use different ones. When the pictures transfer from the camera to my computer, about 15-20 percent come across as non-readable, however the properties of the non-readable file indicate .jpg. I know it's not my photo viewing programs, because I have tried all of the different ones to open them with (Adobe Photoshope, IFRAN, IE Explorer, Image Expert, Zoombrowser, etc.) So for some reason, a portion of the pictures appear to become corruputed, but the rest are fine! Another interesting fact is that I can view them on the camera via thumbnails, but when I try to download them to the computer, it's unreadable.

A couple more pieces of information:

1. Just for the sake of arguement, since I originally thought that the pictures 'some how' had been converted to RAW format, I attempted to just open those files with the Zoombrowser RAW editor, however it didn't recognize them as RAW. Going back to the properties, they all indicate that it is a .jpg file.


2. The picture settings I've been using are the manual setting primarly (P) and trying the other features from time to time i.e. Portrait view. I like to take a lot of B/W so I ususally use that feature as well. What is odd as well is that it seems to happen more when I'm switching between normal (no effects) and B/W. If I'm operating no effects, and switch to B/W, then then those pictures immediately following do not come out, even though the 'only' setting I change is to switch to B/W. 'However' with that being said, it has happened many times on color pics as well.

3. I am downloading the pics directly from the camera to the computer via USB, using Zoombrowser primarly to download.


I just don't understand what I could be doing wrong. I tend to think it is me, and not the camera since I know it's a great piece of equipment...but I'm not sure.

Can anyone help me?
Thanks!
Robert (new G3 user)

Did you format the CF cards before using them for the first time on the G3?

Also, do you have a card reader so you can try downloading them directly from the card using the reader?

1) Try to transfer the images to another computer, and see if it happens there as well, just to see if the problem is with the computer (virus?)
2) Try Canons FileViewer utility instead of Zoombrowser
3) Uninstall and re-install software (twain driver)
4) Update twain driver, Zoombrowser, whatever is involved in the transfer
5) If nothing works, perhaps your camera needs to be exchanged. The B/W issue you mention makes it sound like it could be your camera.

Do you have the problem with the 32MB card that came with the camera?
I had the same trouble with two 128MB cards from Crucial Memory, but with the original 32MB, and with a 128 and a 256 from Sandisk no trouble at all. Other people have also had trouble with some makes of card.

Was there any solution to this problem? I just got a G3 the other day. I filled up several CF cards with pictures. Three images experienced the problems described in this thread. Several additional notes:

* I'm using Windows Me, and used the "cameras and scanners" wizard to download the images.

* The three corrupted files were all oriented in portrait with the camera's auto-rotate feature enabled. There were other portrait-oriented shots that did download successfully.

* I was able to get these pictures successfully downloaded to my PC by using the "File Viewer Utility" instead of the wizard.

* I checked Canon's website and saw that they have an updated WIA driver (5.0.5). I installed it, but it did not fix the problem (maybe I should uninstall/reinstall?).

Windiws ME is a notoriously bad OS. I would suggest an upgrade to XP or 2000. Windows 9x is not a very stable or forgiving OS.

For various reasons, an OS change is impractical for me. Has anyone encountered and solved the specific problem detailed in this thread?

(I guess I can always just disable the auto-rotate feature on the camera, and manually rotate within BreezeBrowser. That's better than corrupted files.)

I have had the same problem with two Kodak 256MB cards. This happened to landscape photos as well, in RAW, 2272x1704 and 1024x768 superfine JPEG modes.