Originally posted by wings I am the only one who operates this camera, but as mentioned previously the issue was solved by forcing the camera to read SD #1. It appears that this is a known problem, but not one that Pentax had addressed. This is a bit odd and IMO the timing of inserting an SD card should not matter.
You are correct that timing does not matter, though sequence does.
From the first report 6 1/2 years ago:
Originally posted by Adam Pentax K-3 Dual Slots: Bug?
As far as I can tell, the K-3 doesn't have a setting that lets you control which SD slot to save to. It will always go to SD1 and then to SD2 once SD1 fills up, unless you choose to back up or split JPEGs/RAWs/videos (which I'm not doing).
So I found an interesting bug. Steps to reproduce:
1. Insert two cards into the camera then power the camera on
-> SD1 should the shown as the selected card slot
2. Remove the card from SD1 then power the camera on
-> SD2 should be shown as the selected card slot
3. Re-insert a card into SD1 and then power the camera on
-> SD2 will still be shown as the selected card slot
-> There is no way to go back to using SD1 unless you remove SD2
I'm able to reproduce this consistently, and it's already gotten a bit annoying. Is there really no way to force the camera to use SD1 whenever there's a card there? Surely I must be missing something. Otherwise Pentax either (a) needs to fix this behavior or (b) needs to add an option to select which slot to use as the primary slot.
If the K-1 were different, I am pretty sure Adam would have said something in his response above in this thread. There is no way to explicitly choose the default start slot for sequential use using the menus or the control panel in K-3, K-3II, K-1, or K-1ii.* However, the camera does account for the case where writes have rolled over to slot #2 with the full card in slot #1 being swapped out for fresh card (and
vice versa).
If you feel this happened spontaneously in the course of general shooting, there may be a problem with the mechanism in slot #1, the contacts in card slot #1, or with the contacts of the card itself.
Steve
* The 645D allows for very flexible settings for each card slot including default for sequential use. The 645Z manual uses wording similar to that for the cameras listed above.