A family in Ratby went through a late parent's camera bag and found an xD Picture Card, the format Olympus and Fuji used for a few years and nobody has made since. A supermarket print kiosk reported the card as empty. A card reader bought to try at home called it unreadable. Between those two verdicts sat the last two years of a man's photographs, and his daughter was fairly sure of it, because she remembered the camera being used.
| Media | An xD Picture Card out of an obsolete compact camera, reported as empty by a retail print kiosk and as unreadable by a consumer card reader. The pictures on it were believed to be the owner's last two years of photography. |
| What was reported | xD Picture Card from an old digital camera, a print kiosk says it is empty, a card reader says it is unreadable, pictures believed to be on it, the camera it came from no longer available. |
| Fault class | A failed connection to the memory rather than a failure of the memory. The card's contact fingers had corroded where they had sat in a damp bag, and the addressing that an xD card relies on its host to provide had nothing to work with. The stored pages were intact. |
| On the bench | Read first behind a hardware write blocker on a controlled reader that supports the format properly, rather than through a generic adapter; the contact fingers and the body examined under a stereo microscope with the corrosion mapped; the memory then read at chip level, the die lifted under hot air by chip-off and read on a specialist programmer; the pages descrambled, error correction applied and the image assembled; the pictures carved by content signature in PhotoRec, previewed individually and written to fresh media. |
Two devices disagreeing about a card usually means neither could reach it. A kiosk that says a card is empty has mounted something and found no index it recognises. A reader that says a card is unreadable has not got that far. Both are statements about what the machine managed, not about what is stored, and neither is evidence that a card is blank.
The format is most of the problem. An xD card is closer to bare memory than a modern card is, with much of the addressing work done by the camera rather than by a controller in the card. Generic readers handle it through an adapter that often cannot address it correctly even when everything is healthy. Add corroded contacts and there is no path at all, which is why two different verdicts arrived at the same practical answer.
Corrosion on the fingers is a damp bag, not neglect. Cards left in cases in lofts, garages and camera bags acquire a dull film across the contacts that a reader cannot push current through. It looks like nothing under a desk lamp and is obvious under a microscope. The film is on the outside; the die under the resin is sealed and had not been touched by any of it.
Reading the die directly bypasses the whole argument. With the memory off the board there is no contact path to fail and no host addressing to get wrong. What has to be rebuilt afterwards is the arrangement, since the pages come back in the order the memory was written rather than the order a camera would present them. On a card holding photographs that reconstruction is well understood, because a picture file announces itself clearly at its start.
The controlled reader was tried first, since a card that reads properly on one is a much shorter job than one that does not. It did not respond, and under magnification the reason was plain: the contact fingers were filmed over and pitted, with two of them worn through to the substrate.
The die was lifted under hot air, cleaned and read on a programmer. Descrambling and error correction turned the raw read into an image, and PhotoRec carved the pictures out of it by content. Each one was previewed rather than counted, the dates read out of the picture data, and the results ordered by that date so the family could see the run of them rather than a folder of numbers.
A little over four hundred photographs came back, running from a holiday to a christening, with the last of them taken about a month before the camera was put away. The daughter's recollection had been right and both machines had been wrong, which is the ordinary outcome when a consumer device gives a verdict on an obsolete card.
Cards are £250 + VAT. Lifting the memory off the board is chip-level work and the published exclusion covers it, so 50% of the figure was payable before the work began and the remainder after the pictures had been seen.
Treat an empty verdict from a kiosk or a consumer reader as an opinion about the reader. Do not put the card back into a camera and reformat it because the camera suggests that, which is the single most damaging thing available on the menu, and do not run a tool that offers to repair the card in place. If the contacts look dull, resist the urge to rub them clean with anything, because the plating on old cards is thin and rubbing removes what is left of it. Old formats are worth sending in rather than shopping around for a reader: SmartMedia, xD, MiniSD and the early CompactFlash cards are all readable on a bench, and the equipment that does it properly stopped being sold to the public a long time ago. Pack it rigid and say which camera it came out of, because the make changes how the pages are arranged.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
A file that appears in a scan has not gone anywhere; the index that lists it has
A card that reads as empty has lost its list, not its contents
A card has nothing moving inside it, so a fall damages the way in rather than the contents
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.