Originally posted by victormeldrew As a result they are also expensive
If you can afford a digital camera and lenses worth several thousand dollars, memory cards (which are comparatively cheap) the very medium upon which the images are stored - should be carefully considered.
Originally posted by noelpolar am trying SD formatter to see if that fixes em.
If there are bad sectors or faulty memory cells there is no format that can possibly rectify the issue. At best the cards memory cells can be tested and defective cells can be mapped out - but there will be a loss of card capacity. As a rule of the thumb: when memory cells start failing, it indicates a high probability that more problems will arise.
This is not one of my own cards but as a cautionary tale:
With a capacity of 8Gb and only a year of use: only 30.6mb of memory cells on this card were viable. The hyperdrive was able to recover 4Gb of images, but the rest were scrambled
beyond recovery. This card was an OEM device with a generic store brand, a cheap card. I pulled the card apart, and traced the memory and controller IC chip serial number to a manufacturer which was Hynix, based in South Korea. The quality of soldiering of memory chip and supporting electronics was woeful, and the PCB everything was on was no more than a printed ribbon, less substantial than a piece of paper.