You may have read Beth talking about the new camera – a Canon IXUS 850IS. It’s certainly a great little camera, and certainly recommended.

However at the same time I bought a SanDisk SD 2 GB ULTRA II memory card, as the camera only ships with a measly 16mb card. We’ve had no problems using the card, until it came to uploading the pictures to the Mac.

A while back I upgraded the ageing no-brand 6-in-1 card reader I was using to a Belkin 15-in-1 reader that supported xD cards, the format used by our Fuji camera. Up to now I’ve had no problems with it, but it steadfastly refuses to read the SanDisk memory card – it repeatedly comes up as un-initialised, and demands to format the card. Letting it do that results in a total lock up from the card reader. The problem is only related to that SD card, other capacities and brands are fine, including the 16mb card that came with the camera, however the Canon IXUS has no problems.

Just as an experiment, I dug out the old USB 1.1 no-brand 6-in-1 reader and gave it a go, plugged in the SanDisk memory card, and up it popped, no errors, nothing.

I guess there must be something peculiar going on with the hardware in the Belkin 15-in-1, unfortunately the whole reason I switched was because the 6-in-1 physically couldn’t take the newer cards, plus it’s only USB 1.1, so is really slow for transfers. Maybe I’ll have to invest in one of the SanDisk ImageMate 12-in-1 readers, on the basis that their reader will be compatible with their own brand cards. Having said that, a quick dig around the internet, and I find reports that the SanDisk ImageMate 12-in-1 reader is incompatible with some other memory card types too… I thought standard were supposed to solve all these problems?