Formatting card in camera

[RadioNate]

I can choose "low level format" or uncheck that. What's the difference? Should I be using one over the other?

thanks

 

[Charade]

What camera? Mine (D70) only has one choice for format.

 

[JR6ooo4]

Just going on memory here,
When I changed the setting on DW's S2 to anything other than low level the option to format is not highlighted anymore.
what do you see?
Mikeeee

 

[seashoreCM]

On my camera (a Canon) there is the second setting "low level forrmat". The instruction says to use low level format if I notice unusually long download time (moving pictures to my computer) or have difficulty shooting using the video (movie) mode which I did not notice before.

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[boBQuincy]

Wow, low level format! My old 10D does not have that!

The difference is that most normal format procedures only remove the first letter of the file, making the space open for writing again. This is why images from even a formatted card can often be recovered, the file is still there until it is written over..

Low level formatting totally wipes out any traces of the files, similar to formatting in a PC (but not "Quick Format", that's the same as in the camera).

Why would you use low level format? In case the card became corrupted, or after many read/format cycles. In these cases all of the memory space is often not available and a low level format cleans the card completely.

I usually format mine in the PC, never had a problem.

 

[0bli0]

interesting use of terminology.... in the olden days (wfm & RLL), you low-level formatted a hard drive (which was blank or from a different computer) to tell the drive controller where the data is going to be written and where it's not (bad sectors, etc). once you've done this, you can then format the drive, but the data is still going to be physically within those cylinders, heads, and sectors. with IDE drives, this is done in the factory. if you have the appropriate software and know the exact model number of a drive, you can low level format a hard drive, although it's not recommended.

with flash memory, you can generally quick format (basically wipe the fat table) or format -wipe the fat table, and redefine the format type (FAT/FAT32/NTFS/etc.) and cluster size using a PC. changing the cluster size can give better performance using some sizes of cards on some cameras. i have seen some cameras using the "Low Level" format terminology to describe a non-quick format (it rewrites the formatting, but does not remap the cylinder/head/sector in the controller).

Canon has recently added 'Low Level' format option to the 1Dmk2N for SD cards only, which allows the system to mark out bad sectors, so it's truly doing a low level format.

btw - a low level format will take longer than a regular format. if you're not having read/write issues. it's best to do a regular one.