Fix This Digital Camera

June 7, 2006 7:34 AM

My sister's camera has stopped recognizing her memory card- in the middle of her vacation. Help!

The camera, a Fuji E510, was working fine yesterday- I even uploaded all the pictures currently on it onto my Mac. But, when she turned it on this morning, the camera screen said "Card Not Initialized". Uh oh. How do we fix this?

posted by ThePinkSuperhero to technology (7 comments total)

Would it have anything to do with my connecting and disconnecting it to my computer?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:34 AM on June 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

Have you tried an in-camera format? A computer reformat followed by an in-camera format? If those two steps fail, a new memory card is pretty cheap; she might even want to buy a couple so she will always have a spare and have plenty of memory.
posted by TedW at 7:38 AM on June 7, 2006

ThePinkSuperhero writes "Would it have anything to do with my connecting and disconnecting it to my computer"

Probably not.

I'm guessing she has never formated the card in the camera, at least not for a while. Try that first (warning: will erase all images on the card). We see this all the time at work, it is why professionals often format the card after every use even though it shortens their life. The cost of the media pales in comparison to losing an irreplaceable shot.
posted by Mitheral at 7:40 AM on June 7, 2006

Yup, that worked. Thank you all for being here in our time of need.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:42 AM on June 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I apologize for bringing what was clearly such an easy question to AskMeta, but I know nothing about digital cameras.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:42 AM on June 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I actually had a similar problem when my power to my computer flickered while it was writing to a card; I'm guessing that removing the card from the reader at an inopportune time could also cause problem, so it might have had something to do with downloading the pics to the computer. Glad to hear the fix was simple.
posted by TedW at 7:57 AM on June 7, 2006

I've had that problem happen with my Mac and a Fuji before. maybe it's typical.

Hmm.. preliminary research suggests that if you have iPhoto set to delete items after import it'll try to *reformat* the card, instead of just deleting images, and occaisionally this reformat isn't compatible with the camera's desired format.

can anyone confirm this?

FWIW I stopped importing photos into iPhoto entirely because it seemed so crashy, but I'm sure that's been largely fixed by now (this was 4 or 5 years ago).
posted by fishfucker at 10:57 AM on June 7, 2006