Pentax X5 deletes photos randomly!

[augusto]

Hi guys,

I have just bought a Pentax X5 and it has deleted a set of photos out of the blue twice. I am really pissed off with this! I have just been on a cruise to New Caledonia and I lost heaps of pictures from a place I will probably never see again. I tried to use recovery softwares to find the deleted pictures with no success. Have any of you had/heard about this issue? What should I do? Sue Pentax and make them pay me another cruise to repair my damage?

Cheers,
Augusto

 

[Overread]

I'm not aware of the X5 having a random deletion problem, although I will admit I'm not a pentax shooter so it could easily have slipped me by. There are, however, a few other possible causes for the problem:

1) User error - you, or another member of your company on the holiday (if there were others) made an error when using the camera. This could be as simple as a miss stroke of a button press (my old 400D canon camera had Delete and Delete all right next to each other on the review menu - one could very easily hit the wrong option if not paying attention).
A good way to avoid this problem is to buy more memory cards than you need so that you don't have the problem of having to delete shots whilst in the field and can simply copy them to a computer and then remove what content you to.

2) Corrupt memory card - the fault might be with the card itself. The only correction here is to replace the memory card. If its happening with multiple cards this is less likely (although still possible if all the cards were bought at the same shop and are of the same brand and type as manufacture errors will often run in batches).

3) Firmwire error on the camera - easily correctable by going to the Pentax website and downloading and installing the latest firmwire release (or reinstalling the existing version).


Those three would be the most likely causes for the loss of card data. Sadly restorative software can only restore lost data if the card has no further data written to it; if you do write new data to the card (eg taking photos) the new data can overright the old and thus corrupt the old data beyond being retrievable.

 

[Jeremyh100]

Listen your problem could be your SD card. SD cards are notorious at deleting images, especially if they are the cheaper budget type. What make was yours? Your X5 comes with a years guarantee so replacement or repair is not a problem. This will not get your pics back, but it will sort the camera. I would look at the card being the issue though. There is no new firmware for the X5 because it is so new (Sept 2012) I dont go with the theory that its user error. Deleting pictures from the X5 is not easily done by pure accident. Just always remember buy the best card you can afford. By the way what size is the card being used ie 4Gb 8Gb.

 

[BrianV]

Did you try the camera with the SD cards before the once-in-a-lifetime event? Always a good idea. I've had problems with the UHS-1 Sandisk cards in multiple cameras, have never head problems with the middle-of-the-line 10x, 6x, and 4x cards. It is always best to test combinations of camera and SD card before trusting them to anything important. You'll find the warranty covers a replacement Card that is defective, or a repair of the camera if defective. You are not going to get a free cruise out of it. Sandisk replaced my UHS-1 card twice.

 

[unpopular]

Pentax cameras have auto-talent technology built in, and will automatically delete any photos which aren't very good. Unfortunately there is no way to turn this feature off.