Camera Labs

Howdy All,

During a long weekend trip out of town I was doing a series of photo shoots. During on of my shoots, I had to swap out cf cards. When I did, I accidentally bent the pins in the cf card slot. I've only owned my 7D for about 8 months, but had not run into this problem before. I checked the pin holes on the cf card I was attempting to insert and did not see any defects or foreign debris blocking the pin holes.

Since the 7D is designed to only allow you to insert the card correctly, I was amazed that this happened. I was wondering if any of you had some tips for me to prevent this problem happening again. The options I am considering now is to never take the cf card out and only use the USB cable to dump my RAW files. This is what I normally do if I don't use all 32GB of cf card space. This option would require that I take a netbook or laptop with me on shoots that I am going to take over 1000 photos.

There are other alternatives, but I wanted to get some community feedback on this situation. Any tips, advice, or experience would be greatly valued.

-Brian

PS: For those interested, I tried to bend the pins back into place with a hair pin. When I did this, I broke one. I did not have a backup camera either. My 7D is at one of the Canon Factory Repair Centers being fixed. /mantears

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Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM UD, Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS, Canon Speedlite 580 XII

I don't have any suggestions on prevention, since I never had any problems with this or any other camera that uses CF cards. I would ask one question, what brand were the cards? Just wondering in case it might be a case of poor tolerance on the cards themselves that contributed.

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.

The card I was taking out was this: SanDisk SDCFX-032G-A61 32 GB Extreme CompactFlash Memory Card 60MB/S

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-SDCFX-032 ... sk+cf+32gb

The card I put in was this: Transcend 32 GB Compact Flash Card 400X (Blue)

http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Compact ... nd+cf+32gb

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Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM UD, Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS, Canon Speedlite 580 XII

Update on the bent pin drama. Canon is going to fix the problem under warranty. The camera is currently 8 months old.

If anyone wants to chime in my inquiry about prevention, please do.

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Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM UD, Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS, Canon Speedlite 580 XII

The same thing happened to the fire department's EOS 30D about two years ago - Canon took several months to fix it and it wasn't much cheaper than a used EOS 30D, which was a shame.
It happens... That's why I try to be very careful putting CF cards into the cameras - some kind of horror scenario somewhere in the back of my mind.

But I'm happy Canon is going to fix your camera under warranty.

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Canon EOS 500D + Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Canon EF 24-105mm 4L IS USM + EF 100-400mm 4.5-5.6L IS USM + EF 100mm 2.8L Macro IS USM + Sigma 12-24mm 4.5-5.6 EX DG HSM + Canon Speedlite 580 EX II + Nissin Speedlite Di 466

Probably not hard to fix at home with various amount of thin long tools. Thin long flat screwdriver, ruler, etc. Depends on which pin though.

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Canon 5D MkII -|- Sigma 24mm f/1.8 | Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2.0 | Canon 50mm f/1.4 | Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro | Lensbaby Composer
Canon A-1 -|- Canon 28mm f/2 | Canon 35mm f/2.8 | Canon 50mm f/3.5 Macro