Two digital camera questions

Factual Questions
1

My old digital camera died, so just got a new one, along with a 512MB SD card.

  1. Both the included card and the new one work just fine in the camera. Is it necessary or advisable to format them anyway?

  2. I think I read somewhere that they should be formatted only in the camera. True? Could I put them in my card reader and format them from Windows?

2

There is no need to format them in Windows. Older cards like those in the SmartMedia format and maybe others would sometimes get ruined if they were formatted in a computer reader. I don’t think that happens that often with most formats these days.

However, if they work, that’s all there is. There are no more hidden features or benefits by doing it differently.

3

Never format your camera via Windows, only do so in the camera. There are formats that your camera won’t recognize and it can be a royal pain in the ass to get the cards back into the right format.

I reformat my cards (in the camera) once every few months. No particular reason to, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it hurts anything.

4

'Tis best to format the media through the hardware that writes to and reads from it.

I also format my cards before every use.

5

While the number of read/write cycles you can do on secure digital media is somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 (really big), I avoid excessive formatting for voodoo reasons. Every now again is fine though.

BTW, Telemark is wrong about formatting in Windows; sometimes it’s a royal pain in the ass, and you still don’t have a working card after. :wink:

6

FWIW, every device that I have used that takes SecureDigital (SD) and/or MultiMedia Cards (MMC) (and, by extension, MiniSD and MiniMMC) cards have used a standard Windows-compatible FAT16 format in every device I’ve used them in, and I have never experienced any problems formatting them either in their devices or under Windows.

There may have been devices that used their own peculiar format, but I would imagine these are pretty rare, as the vast majority of devices that use SD/MMC cards use the same FAT16 format in order to be more or less universally compatible with all devices and with all media card readers.

There’s always the chance that a poorly designed reader could muck up your card, though.

7

Why, almost no advantage that I know of?