When I bought my Kodak digital camera, it came with an 8MB CF "card".  I
expected to take a lot of pictures, so I opted to purchase a 32MB card as
well, also from Kodak.

  Prices have fallen, and I've really gotten into taking pictures, so I
recently invested in a 256MB card, not from Kodak but from SimpleTech.

  I've discovered that the behavior of this new card is apparently not quite
the same as the Kodak cards:

1.  The camera needs some time to format each shot as a JPEG and save it; it
can have two shots in the queue.  With the Kodak card, it would not take a
third shot while the queue was full.
  With the Simpletech card, the camera will let me take additional shots,
but they get saved to the card with a size of 0.

2.  The camera download/interface firmware doesn't know how to handle files
whose size is 0.  Any attempt to download or erase these shots will hang the
camera -- I need to pop the batteries to reset it.
  Luckily, I can fairly easily avoid trying to download these files, and can
periodically reformat the card instead of just erasing those files.  Of
course, now that I know what it's doing, I'll try to avoid creating more of
them.

  While I'm certain that the second part is a firmware bug in the camera, I
have to wonder if the first is symptomatic of a design defect in the
SimpleTech CF products.  Anybody else encountering weird behavior with these?

David Gillett

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