Photographer Gil Lavi described on his blog in details his experiences with a brand new Leica M9 camera and different SanDisk memory cards, mainly from the Ultra/Extreme series. His camera crashed on several occasions and he lost multiple images, some of which were written as 0 KB file size. Similar issue occurred with a second M9 camera and different SanDisk memory card:
“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.
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.”
It seems that Leica is currently investigating the problem. I have been using SanDisk Exteme memory cards for almost two years and never had this problem. Has anyone experienced similar issues?
