my canon powershot a50 is not detecting the compactflsh card.

-- Lily Martinez (SelenaQ@aol.com), July 22, 2000

Answers

Hi, Yesterday evening when I tried to shoot with my A60 it showed a memory card error and all the images that I had stored in it were lost. I checked the manual which said in such cases you can try re- formatting. I tried that and when I did a format it gave me the following error ->E50. What does this mean and how do I rectify this? Also, the 16MB CF card now shows a memory of only 3.8MB. Please help me out with this problem.

Can i recover my images and the CF card thru some s/w? Can i do the recovery only thru a card reader?

regards,

Arunkumar Sivaraman

-- ARUNKUMAR SIVARAMAN (arun_junta@rediffmail.com), July 29, 2003.

By turning on my Canon Powershot A50 showed me the message "CF" blinking. I then tried another compactflash card and I had the same message. It was clear: the camera doen't anymore recognise the cards. I then tried to reformat the cards through the camera and I had a message error "E50". Can somebody help me out of this situation ?

Many thanks in advance.

JJ

-- JJ Criqui (jcriqui@epo.org), September 17, 2004.

I got a lot of input on this error. Went to the retailer, wholesaler & manufacturer as well as a few knowledgeable friends.

CF manufacturer tested with an identical card and an identical camera with no error so we assume it was a faulty card... despite the fact that it would work in other cameras and readers.

My wholesaler replaced the CF card with a 52x Ridata (5 yr warranty)... without any fuss. I never got any further feedback on the cause of the problem. I suspect my retailer simply sold it to someone whose camera tolerated the memory without problems.

My friend Peter came up with the best suggestion. He works for Sharp and says that even CF cards have firmware. He suggested that the firmware was old and was the cause of the problem.

The lesson to be learned from this was: buy CF memory with a decent warranty (mine had 3 yrs) even if it costs a bit more: CF memory seems to have a fairly high rate of problems (lots of people have e-mailed me with the same or similar problems).

-- Michael Czajka (MC1@pobox.com), February 13, 2005.