memory card fidelity

[pshanahan]

Hi Folks,

just a question. lets say you are taking a lot of pics with a Canon Eos. you are processing them then blanking the memory card. does anyone know if when you blank or erase the photos that the memory card becomes "pristine?" again. I thought about it as I blanked the 64 Gig card for the 50th time. is there a residua that may add to "noise" in future photos.

Your thoughts, as always, are very appreciated.

Respectfully,

Patrick Shanahan

[pipnina]

Digital images are much less tolerant of errors post-capture (after the photo is taken and is now stored, either as a film in a can or on a card) since changing 1 bit out of the 8, 12, 14 or 16, per channel could result in a white pixel becoming cyan or a black pixel becoming red/green/blue). Also, digital media becomes unreadable if certain parts of the file become changed by even 1 bit (8 bits in a byte, 1000 bytes in a kilobyte (size of a small .txt file)) the OS or software reading it won't know what to do with it or will encounter issues trying.

Don't worry about your card, the data is still there on it after it has been deleted, actually (if it's been formatted) and it's just marked the thing as being writable space. Very little data being changed.

I've had cards for many many years having taken many 10s of 1000s of images, none of them have gone wrong yet. (the things that read them are useless, however!)

    ~pip

[wxsatuser]

Would have thought good quality cards would not add any noise to future images.

If you just delete files they are still there until they are overwritten or the card is formatted.

Wether this could add noise, I don't know for sure, have you noticed something with this.

[pshanahan]

Thanks for the reply. I was just wondering. I have been using the same card for a few months. I have a 32G card still in the box but I guess there is no reason to change from a 64.

Clear Skies, 

Shanahan