[Glen]

I bought my K20 about a year ago and along with it a cheap class 1, 8gb sd card. I never had any trouble with it and never lost a photo. A couple of months ago I saw a sale at a national camera chain for an Acumen class 6, 8gb card. I thought I should have a spare so why not upgrade and see what a higher end card can do. At first it seemed fine, but then some strange things started to happen. I would take a photo and then try and bring it up and there would be nothing there. It seemed to show a place for the photo but nothing else. I reformatted it and tried again and it would be fine. Today, at a social event I took a lot of photo's. I didn't get a chance to look at them and didn't think about it so I just kept taking more. I ended up near a river with patches of ice on it as it flowed past. Again I took more photo's but with family and two dogs along there was no time to look at them on the display. When I returned home I fired up Lightroom to download but there were no photo's. I tried to take a picture to see if anything would record and and all worked fine until I used the display to look and there would be nothing to display. I returned the cheap sd card to the camera and the K20 works fine again. So much for the high end card. Has this happened to others? Are there limits to the kinds of cards such as class 1 or class 6 that the K20 can reliably read and write to?

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Last edited by Glen; 11-15-2009 at 09:13 AM.

The camera isn't the problem it was the card.

[interested_observer]

I have an assortment of SD cards, 1, 2, and 4GB in my K100 and K20 along with a Panasonic LX3 and Canon SD500. All are at least 133x or class 6. I have 4 Transend cards (2GB), 3 SanDisk Extreme III cards (4GB SDHC), Kingston and Patriot (several 1GB of each). I have never had any problems over the last 5 years with any of them.

Also for card capacities above 2GB they need to be SDHC in order to use the full capacity.

As the beloved Brit said - its the card and not the camera. Get your cards from respected local or online retailers (newegg, frys.com, etc.). Forget about ebay.

Here is some general information on SD cards...

Secure Digital - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

hope that helps...

As the beloved Brit said -

Aw, shucks!

[KungPOW]

I think its a credit to the K20D that it functions at all when a junk card is stuffed into it.

[Glen]

I visited the camera shop yesterday to return my Acumen class 6, eight gb SD card. They were able to recover some of my photo's using their software but it was clear that the data was corrupted. It's a good shop so they offered me a refund, exchange or credit. I opted for an exchange to another brand which was SanDisk. The only problem was that they only carried SanDisk's best line so I now have the class 10, faster than any card needs to be, product. So far it works fine. No more losses.

I can't really blame cheap SD cards in general because I've been using a very cheap no name card up to now and had no problems until I used that Acumen. The no name class 1 cost $19, the Acumen cost $50 and the SanDisk was over $100. Ouch that is expensive. All is well that ends well.

[Ash]

There should be cheaper Sandisk cards around, unfortunate that there weren't any at your local store. But having the class 10 means that with any camera upgrade, you won't have to worry so much about buying a new SD card - at least for a year or two.