Problems with OLY Proprietary Format?

[alashas]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to ScubaBoard, and to UW photography, too. And, what the heck, pretty much a novice when it comes to computers, too.

I've got an Oly c5050 PT-015 that I've used on a couple of recent dive trips. I've recently purchased a HP Media Center PC, and have been experimenting with their "Image Zone" photo editing, and am fairly happy with the results, but will probably also purchase PE3 to try to eliminate some of the noise.

I do not currently have a notebook, but am considering one, and am looking closely at HP zv5000 models. I've read numerous dive trip reports that recommend downloading pics daily to a laptop, and that makes sense to me. I'll be diving in Fiji fo 3 weeks in June, and it makes sense to download the pics daily, in case of a camera flooding problem that could destroy the memory card.

However, in reading notebook reviews, I came across the one below. Has anyone else had similar problems reading or downloading Oly Sandisk to a notebook and then being unable to use the card again in the camera? Thus far, I have had no problems reading my cards in HP and Dell PCs and then using them again in my camera. Thanks for your input.

"Well, I received my HP zv5000 yesterday, over a week earlier than HP's estimated shipping date. That's the good news. Unfortunately, if things don't get better real soon, I will be returning this within a week! For starters, I am very surprised that more people do not complain about the fan constantly running. This is certainly something that takes getting use to! This thing is a monster, although in time, I'm sure I will probably be happy with it's size (good thing I'm not lugging it around).

But right now I am really upset by the media card reader. I put my Olympus sandisk (SDSM) in the reader and was able to read the card, however, that was short lived. After rebooting the system with the card in, I tried to access the card again, it said that it needed to be formatted. I took the card out (after using safely remove hardware) and put it back in my camera. Not only didnt the camera read the card, but it wouldnt even format it...it just came up with a card error! I then put the card back into the notebook and was able to format it from there (now I'm able to copy to and read the card - from the notebook), but the camera still wont read or format the card! Does anyone know what could have happened or what I can do to fix my card? I certainly don't want to experiment with my only other card left. The safely remove hardware says this is TI PCMCIA SmartMedia. Could I formatted the card incorrectly? Is there anyway to fix this?? Help!"

http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=713&whichpage=36

"I contacted HP..they were of no help, except that they did advise me to contact SanDisk (the maker of the card). I then contacted SanDisk and they were great! Apparantly, the woman explained that Olympus (my camera mnfg) has a proprietary format. As soon as the media card was placed into and read by the notebook, she said the card wouldn't be recognized by the camera. She did indicate that it may work one or two times, but made it very clear that Olympus cameras are very proprietary and it eventually wouldn't work. She did say that Olympus was the only camera mnfg that this was a problem with. Anyway, SanDisk is sending me a new card! How generous is that? When in fact it's really a problem with Olympus. I am going to give Olympus a call as well and see if they have a driver I could load on the notebook, but in the meantime, I will just be hooking the camera up to the notebook and leave my media card out of the card reader. Good Luck!"

http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=713&whichpage=38

 

[herman]

Oh yea, I learn about smart media the hard way, luckily I only had a couple of cheap cards distroyed. The problem is with the formatting of smart media, I don't know the particulars but basically, if you accidently format (or write) to the card in a reader, it's toast. The good news is if you only down load while the card is in the camera you avoid the problem all together. I am not too sure the problem actually is the camera but it's a good story for the media makers to tell. There may be a good reason smart media is getting hard to find. With Smart Media is getting hard to find anyway and CF a lot easier to deal with, cheaper and to my knowledge does not suffer the same problem you are better off using CF anyway. I have used several other smart media cards for quite a while with no problems...JUST BE DARN SURE YOU DON'T WRITE TO THEM.

 

[diveborg]

Smart media is a dying format. Compact Flash is faster, cheaper, comes in much larger capacity, I've seen 4 gig cards, and is much more universal. I also have a couple of xD cards I keep in my C5050 as backup storage. You also need xD if you want the use the panorama function with the C5050, although I did read of a workaround so you could use CF.

Sorry that this doesn't help you more. I always use an USB 2.0 card reader with my iBook and G4 to read the cards and have not had any problem with reading or writing to them.

 

[alashas]

So, it sounds as though you are both saying the problem is basically with the smart media card rather than with Oly Proprietary Format, is that correct? Thanks

 

[herman]

That's what my problem was or at least that's what a couple of SM makers and Oly told me. I have since avoided SM when ever possible and NEVER download it from anything but the camera, so far/so good. If you have to or just want to down load via an extenal reader, I would move the pictures from SM to CF using the move function in the camera and then put the CF in the reader.

 

[jakubson]

So, it sounds as though you are both saying the problem is basically with the smart media card rather than with Oly Proprietary Format, is that correct? Thanks

I have used xD and CF in card readers, and written to them in card readers, with no problems. Sound like smart media is the culprit.

 

[Tiny Bubbles]

I just went through this with my smartmedia card. I let a dive buddy pull the pictures off with his card reader, and after that the olympus camera would say the card is invalid and then turn off, even though the card works fine in his computer and mine. After several days of trying different fixes, I got the card working again. There are a few websites that have the fix you can download, but it only works with a few types of card readers. It would not work with my card reader or with my dive buddies either. I purchaced a micromedia ZiO (marketed by dazzle) card reader, which is a small reader that is intended to turn your old obsolete cards into a pen drive, and ran the two smprep.exe files, and it took care of it on the 1st try. Shame on Olympus for this one.

http://www.sallyandsteve.dsl.pipex.com/smartmedia/
http://www.marshost.com/~rashmun/smprep.htm
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/smcrestore/
http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/borge/SMbackups/index.html
http://www.digital-world.info/viewtopic/t-1104/start-6/sid-583ef54d16f3a0e909b621354edab7ee.html

 

[Charlie99]

I had a similar problem with an Olympus XD memory card and an Olympus Stylus camera. To make a long story short, I made the mistake of formatting it with a PC. That style of format is not compatible with my camera. (I'll leave the details of FAT12 vs FAT16 to somebody who cares).

Olympus does some funny stuff to make their XD cards proprietary such that they will do the panoramic function but other XD cards won't. Because of this, they don't let their cameras do a total reformatting.

The solution was simple ---- I popped the XD card into a Fuji camera and reformatted it.

Olympus no longer recognizes the card for the panoramic function, but since I never use that, that isn't a big deal.

I'm pretty sure that the programs that Tiny Bubbles links to above simply reformat the card into the older FAT12 format that is needed for the Oly camera. Doing a reformat in a Fuji camera (or probably any other camera that supports the memory card in question) will do the same thing.