My M9 is eating SD cards [MERGED}

[gravastar]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

...............................................What is upsetting is that they know of bugs like this and let it continue in a brand new camera, the M9. Its not 100% conclusive to me that the M9 shares this flaw, but it sure looks thats way.......

 

That may not be true. It's possible they thought they had identified the cause of the M8 problems and taken steps to avoid a recurrence in the M9. What seems from the outside, like a similar problem in the M9 may be due to an entirely different set of internal events and could require further debugging.

 

Bob.

[ModernMan]

Just shot about 400 action sports pics with M9 yesterday (135mm/2.8) all with camera set to C, and numerous 2-4 shot "sequences". No lockups. Which does not prove/disprove anything -- its just a happy data point.

[wlaidlaw]

Just shot about 400 action sports pics with M9 yesterday (135mm/2.8) all with camera set to C, and numerous 2-4 shot "sequences". No lockups. Which does not prove/disprove anything -- its just a happy data point.

 

....and no trouble focusing the 135/28 on an M9? I assume that the spectacles make a difference.

 

I was trying to take some photographs at the Nurburgring last year with my 135/4 on an M8. Very difficult. You had to pre-focus on a bit of catch fencing and then guess when the car you were trying to get, was at the same distance from you as the bit of catch fencing you had focussed on, then allowing for the mental and camera lag for a car coming towards you at 250kph.

 

Wilson

[ModernMan]

....and no trouble focusing the 135/28 on an M9? I assume that the spectacles make a difference.

 

I was trying to take some photographs at the Nurburgring last year with my 135/4 on an M8. Very difficult. You had to pre-focus on a bit of catch fencing and then guess when the car you were trying to get, was at the same distance from you as the bit of catch fencing you had focussed on, then allowing for the mental and camera lag for a car coming towards you at 250kph.

 

Wilson

 

Yes, even though I was shooting at f8-f16, i took the Elmarit 135 instead of the Elmar for the viewfinder magnifiaction. The "spectacles" seem to help considerably, bringing the image to what appears to be nearly life size, although an eyepiece magnifier (say 1.4x) would probably be an asset here in instead or in addition.

[35mmSummicron]

That is a very good point you raise, and I would love to give Leica and the M9 the benefit of the doubt (I am on a waiting list for one!) However, I feel that since this is a 3 year old issue, ONE instance of it occuring in the M9 is one too many for me! A camera's primary function is to take photographs, what good is it if it locks up????

 

There are enough quirks being reported on the M9 already (UltraII cards being faster than ExtremeIII's, slow zooming, slow formatting, no EXIF aperture, serial # etc.)

 

I will say that it is still VERY early, not enough people have access to M9's and hopefully new firmware updates will come out soon........I just WANT the M9 to be a SOLID camera it should and needs to be.

 

 

That may not be true. It's possible they thought they had identified the cause of the M8 problems and taken steps to avoid a recurrence in the M9. What seems from the outside, like a similar problem in the M9 may be due to an entirely different set of internal events and could require further debugging.

 

Bob.

[herbet]

Do tell Sean!

 

I've developed a pretty quick technique on my M8 classic of removing the baseplate, battery, reinserting, deleting the last frame on the card (as its usually corrupt from the freezeup) and going back to shooting.....

 

Any series of frames leading to the crash, I usually consider lost and try to reshoot.

 

I can't see how you find this acceptable in a camera at this price point.

[35mmSummicron]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

I can't see how you find this acceptable in a camera at this price point.

 

 

I agree it is completely unacceptable!

 

But I happen to like shooting rangefinders and I have been working with a digital workflow for sometime, which is the only reason I put up shooting with the M8. I am perfectly willing to accept that a camera will NEVER be perfectly tailored to a photographers needs, and that a photographer will have to adapt to certain limitations of the tool.

 

However, this is very much a FLAW, NOT limitation. the M8 and M8.2 are now discontinued products, so I can live with the fact that Leica may not fix them.

 

The M9 however, CANNOT share this problem, which is the point of this thread, and my repeated posts about my M8 experiences.

[dbweisman]

I got my M9 in December and recently took it on a cruise. I had 4 Sandisk Ultra II SDHC cards. With 2 of the cards I had no trouble.

 

However, with the other 2, I lost many photos. Some of the time, the photo was simply not written to the card. (In this case, there was no indication of a problem.) Some of the time, the write never completed. If I removed and replaced the card, sometimes the M9 did not recognize there was a card, and sometimes it couldn't read the folder.

 

I reformatted the cards several times, but the problems remained.

 

I can't believe I have 2 bad cards!

 

Has anyone else found the M9 to be very sensitive to memory card "issues?"

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

[jaapv]

Where do you buy your cards?

[dbweisman]

Amazon

[ho_co]

Sorry for the difficulty.

 

Amazon should be a safe source, but it might help to check the SanDisk site; I understand there's a page there on detecting counterfeit cards. Since SanDisk is so popular, it's also a brand subject to a fair amount of counterfeiting.

 

What sizes are the cards? IIRC, at one time, Leica's M9 FAQ indicated that the 4 GB and the 16 GB SanDisk cards performed better on the camera than the 8 GB versions. But today that's meaningless since card manufacturers are always fiddling with the production and labeling of their cards. Any list of approved cards can quickly go out of date.

 

 

You have two cards that gave no trouble and two that gave a lot, right? Did the good cards get used first, and then the bad cards? The other way around?

 

The M9 does seem a bit picky about its cards. But the description you give sounds as if it might be defective cards, particularly if reformatting doesn't help. You do reformat in the camera, right, not on the computer?

 

You might try another card or two--different size, different brand--and see whether they also act up.

 

I apologize if these ideas seem too obvious and basic. I mention them only in case you're not aware of all that, db.

[pmsf]

I have a brand new Extreme Pro 32Gb (45Mb/s) Sandisk (bought from Amazon UK) that freezed the M9 three times (I have it for a month and a half now) and I had to take the battery off and format the card losting all the photographs stored. Even if I tried to download the card (before formating) to my computer there was no data on it.

 

I have also Extreme III 8 and 16Gb (30Mb/s) which I don't have any complaints about and I have been working with them for 7 months on a daily basis.

 

With Extreme Pro the problem may be a firmware malfunction that should be corrected, I hope, in a future firmware update, as this is a brand new tipe of card.

[dbweisman]

Thanks for the responses.

 

I did format in the M9 with overwrite.

 

I also hope that the firmware revision helps.

[gtownby]

I also had a problem with my 8gb SanDisk Extreme Pro on a brand-new M9 (formatted). It caused the screen to go dark, even though the shutter worked. Turned it in yesterday at my LCS and picked up another brand. Working fine now

[ho_co]

... Turned it in yesterday at my LCS and picked up another brand. Working fine now

Another brand M9?

[nodrog]

Another brand M9?

 

At the risk of sounding like a party pooper - don't you have anything useful to add?

 

I have had problems with both a SanDisk 4GB Extreme & 8GB Extreme Pro. In both cases the camera ceased to function, with black screen, no menu available, but the shutter functioned for a few exposures, then locked up. Also in both cases I recovered all the images using PhotoRescue, but I then had to format the cards on my Mac, in Disk Utility, where I could 'see' the card, but not mount it. I couldn't format either card in camera. It wasn't possible.

 

To say this is a pain in the arse is an understatement -it's ****ing unacceptable (pardon my French). However, I'm still using the cards, as I think I've found a cause of the problem -it has only happened when I've deleted images in preview. It has never happened when I've just kept every picture, without any deletions. IMO there's a bug involved in the deletion process, which, let's hope, can be fixed in a future firmware update.

 

Can anyone else confirm that this actually happens, or is there some other cause that I'm missing?

 

Pete

[Morgan08]

I had the same problem last night

After deleting from preview error message saying no card

Also was not able to format card in camera

 

John

[xrogers]

A couple weeks ago I had a bit of a runaround trying to find cards to work in the M9. I got several 8Gb Sandisk Extreme (marked "HD Video", "30MB/s", class 10) from B&H. These cards would work perfectly for many exposures (after two failures during shooting, I tested and had failures at 69 shots and 173 shots), and then lock up the camera (red light flashing for a long time after a shot, very slow accesses from then on, unable to record new images on the partially full card).

 

I tried a Delkin card, and it eventually hung the camera just like the Sandisk. I borrowed an old Ultra from my wife's camera, and it was excellent, fast and reliable. I bought a new Ultra card next (marked 15MB/s, class 4). Worked fine, but was obviously much slower than the old Ultra. I did some quick timing tests, and found that my old cards were all faster than any of the new cards (the new Ultra was easily the slowest card I tried, the old Ultra the fastest, go figure), and all the old cards were reliable.

 

I think the card really makes a difference in the user experience with an M8/M9. DNG only with a fast card, these cameras feel responsive. Slow card or JPG, and they start feeling like they are getting in my way too often. I did not want these new Ultra cards.

 

Finally, at a local store I found a small cache of previous generation 4Gb Extreme cards (marked 20MB/s, "HD Video", class 6). These cards were excellent, clearly the fastest of all, and worked without issues (shooting until full, reviewing, zooming and occasionally deleting while the buffer emptied). I bought the four cards they had.

 

Clearly, Sandisk changes their cards regularly without changing the name, and the Leica recommended card list is out of date. You can't buy most of the cards on that list, and the nearest replacements (for my limited sample) range from poor to unacceptable. I have some new cards now, but what a waste of time. This is clearly not one of the good things about the M9.

 

--clyde

[maxnoy]

Just had the exact same problem with the Sandisk 8GB Extreme Pro. I wish I read the forums before buying. Unfortunately, shot a two-day candids job on that one card. Huge bummer.

 

Several more people listed the same problem at dpreview -- SanDisk Ex Pro 8GB failure in M9: Leica Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review.

 

I am hoping the rescue software works.

 

 

At the risk of sounding like a party pooper - don't you have anything useful to add?

 

I have had problems with both a SanDisk 4GB Extreme & 8GB Extreme Pro. In both cases the camera ceased to function, with black screen, no menu available, but the shutter functioned for a few exposures, then locked up. Also in both cases I recovered all the images using PhotoRescue, but I then had to format the cards on my Mac, in Disk Utility, where I could 'see' the card, but not mount it. I couldn't format either card in camera. It wasn't possible.

 

To say this is a pain in the arse is an understatement -it's ****ing unacceptable (pardon my French). However, I'm still using the cards, as I think I've found a cause of the problem -it has only happened when I've deleted images in preview. It has never happened when I've just kept every picture, without any deletions. IMO there's a bug involved in the deletion process, which, let's hope, can be fixed in a future firmware update.

 

Can anyone else confirm that this actually happens, or is there some other cause that I'm missing?

 

Pete

[Advertisement]

Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[wda]

There are several threads dealing with this subject. Has anyone passed their experiences to Leica requesting advice?

 

It would seem that there should be some dialogue between Sandisk and Leica to clarify the technical situation. I was fooled by changed nomenclature which appeared with no obvious warning. At least one member reported no problems with Lexar cards. If the Sandisk issue is not resolved quickly, M9 users will migrate to rival brands. I have been a loyal supporter of Sandisk for many years.