AirWalter Loc: Tipp City, Ohio

Wow, are You kidding? I went to a good location yesterday late afternoon to try to get some photos of the US Navy Blue Angels practicing for this weekends air show and wound up taking over 450 images at the expense of 10GB's. A 16GB card wouldn't work too well for Me.

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

You should ALWAYS format flash memory cards in the camera it is being used in. When the camera formats the card, data specific to the make and model of the camera is embedded in a hidden file (metadata) on the memory card. If you format the card in a computer or another camera, that data will be missing and can on occasion cause problems.

AirWalter Loc: Tipp City, Ohio

AMEN!!!

grandpaw

Yes, format it in the camera first, Grandpaw

bmike101 Loc: Gainesville, Florida

my camera makes me format new cards

fishone0 Loc: Kingman AZ

read the manual it says to format the card --years ago I put a new card in camera without formatting and yes I lost those pictures-- a once in a lifetime trip

Angel Star Photography Loc: Tacoma, WA

I always format in the camera and before every shoot. In my work with computing systems, I have encountered several times where a card formatted in one system will experience problems in another system. it is more prevalent when going from my operating system to another but there have been moments with systems of the same operating system. While problems were recoverable, for most, it does elevate the concern as to whether the files will be intact or whether the files will exist after writing to the card. On the latter, I have experienced situations where the system said that it was writing to the card only to find later that the files were not there. Formatting on the same system alleviated the problem. With cameras, if you format in camera, you can be certain that the file structure is as the camera expects it and you are less likely to lose your shoots. My recommendation: Always format in the camera; don't do an "erase all" to clear the card---always format; don't format on a PC and then use it in the camera; and don't delete files using a PC and then use the card in the camera without formatting in camera.

rfmaude41 Loc: Lancaster, Texas (DFW area)

If it's new, it will ALWAYS have a standardized file system.

I have NEVER seen a new (SD) card that was not formatted to the "official" format as describe by the "SD Association", which by the way is recognized by every modern digital camera. In fact, I format all of my cards, using their "special" program, about once every 10 usages (i.e.; after actually formatting in the camera), and have NEVER had any problems.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I use their format tool as well and reference their documentation as the authoritative source on SD cards, but I HAVE received a new Lexar CF 32 GB card that did NOT have a FS and apparently was not formatted. Either way, we both apparently believe that formatting is good practice - do we agree on that?

MikeMck Loc: Southern Maryland on the Bay

format the card. Also, the card is too large, you don't want to fill a 128 gb card with images and then have the card fail on you. Stick with 32gb.

blackest Loc: Ireland

It's worth considering that there are several formats that can be used on a storage device apart from various fat formats there are others e.g ntfs. If you format a card ntfs it will work fine in a windows computer and at least read only in a Mac, it will not work in any camera I know of. Ntfs does have the advantage of holding larger files than fat32 so it is something that gets used from time to time. Windows tends to see large capacity drives as regular hard drives. I have had times where windows didn't recognise a removable drive as needing to be ejected because of the size. If you format a card as hfs+ in a mac then a windows machine sees the card as not formatted.

Some parts of the card are more important than others the file allocation table for instance, other parts are less crucial some sectors of a card are likely defective but usually there are spare blocks held in reserve that get swopped in. You won't know this is occurring till a long way down the line. Things are never perfect and can you imagine a manufacturer dumping cards because there are a few blocks that were defective when the card was made.

Formatting in camera ensures at the least that the file allocation table is read writable and the card is in a suitable format. It's enough reason to do it to avoid failures in the field. To be fair you can get away with it most of the time and you can share cards between cameras. But it's like overtaking on a blind bend maybe 90% of the time you could get away with it, trouble is the 10% of the time you don't.

If you ever thought i could overtake here but decided no, if something is coming the other way... and waited fairly often you will see it wasn't safe at all. Seems the 10% of the time something bad can happen in practice occurs 90% of the time! I think they call it sods law.

If it can go wrong, it will.

So while you can just go ahead and use the card straight from the packet, you probably should format it the first time. Things are not tested 100% of the time, it is just too expensive. Sample testing can give a statistical fail rate of say 95% with a relatively small number of samples. That still means on average 5% defective products get through. Kinda like the argument that a refurb camera is better than new because it actually has been fully checked.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

In-camera before every shoot.

Logan1949

A simple format will just change the first few bytes of the file name in the file allocation table (FAT), usually to a -1 value. If that happens, it is possible to recover the files (before another file is added to the card) by restoring those first few bytes of each file name in the FAT to something readable. However, a deep format can erase or randomize every byte on the card --- and it takes a longer amount of time to do that. Assuming your card had been formatted in your camera to start with, the Format command in the camera should just do a simple format on the card. You might still be able to recover the pictures on such a formatted card.