2011-08-05T21:00:00
Rated 1 out of 5
This camera destroy memory cards
A couple of weeks ago I got a new Leica M9. All excited, I put in the best SD card on the market, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 8GB. It took only a few hours of taking pictures before the card crashed and the camera become unresponsive until I removed the card. I wasn't worried at the beginning. I was in love.
A few days after, I had a high profile portrait photo shoot for an important client. Of course I took the M9 and my beloved Leica 90mm with me, together with a new SanDisk SD card, not before installing the newest firmware update. It was a very long photo shoot with heavy production, a tight schedule and sweaty assistants. It was just before that end of the photo shoot that the other new SanDisk SD card Extreme crashed inside the M9, making the camera dead and the card unreadable in any device. With all the embarrassment, I had to reshoot everything all over again with my backup equipment.
SanDisk were kind enough to replace the card immediately. "Bad batch" is was I was told. I got new SanDisk extreme pro cards from another batch. The same problem came back after one day. Both cards died again, erasing all of the images I created for my clients while shooting, causing me an enormous loss.
This time, I decided to replace not only the kind of cards but the camera itself and to get another M9.
I opened the new M9 Box, took the camera out, charged the battery, put a SanDisk Ultra card this time and went out to check the new one. The first issue I noticed was how slow the camera was writing to the card, but I was ready to live with that for the reliability. And by slow, I mean ridiculously slow. Much slower then the M8.
Today, 5 days later, the camera started to behave very strangely with. I could see the pictures that I had just shot on the screen but then after few moments it disappeared from the card. Occasionally the camera got stuck stating "writing" indefinitely. I waited up to 20-30 minutes after shooting just one frame before removing the battery to fix it. Other times it said "no sd card". The card was formatted in the camera minutes before used.
When I got back and downloaded the files, most of them were "written" but as 0 KByte files. Tried both DNG and Jpeg.
After too long, as I approached Popular photography magazine Leica admitted that the M9/M9P suffers from malfunction causing files deleting and memory card corruption. Leica still selling the cameras while knowing about this malfunction
More details available on my Blog
gillavi
