Devices · cards from cameras
A card is £250 + VAT, with a free look before that. Cards go dark, show empty or refuse to unlock, and in nearly every instance the pictures still come off — the exception being a card somebody has already reformatted. No other device fails as often, and none picks its moment better: the fourth day of a fortnight away, or the very minute you were copying everything somewhere safer. They reach us from dealers photographing stock for the Newark antiques fair, from a wedding photographer whose morning was at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, from a showroom shoot for Long Point in Long Eaton, and from families just back off holiday.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Canon: Memory card error — on other bodies, a card that cannot be accessed | That body cannot read the file system on it | Take it out, then leave it alone |
| Canon DSLR: Reinsert/change the card, following Card cannot be accessed | Dirty contacts — or a controller going | Say no to the format prompt |
| Nikon: This card may be damaged, followed by a request for another | The card is damaged, or nothing at all is being recognised | Never format it inside the camera |
| Card locked, or card write-protected, on screen | The tab on the edge of it, or a controller that has shut itself down | Tab already up? Then it is the card that has the fault |
| Windows will not open it until you format it | The volume reads RAW in Windows while every frame sits untouched | Refuse the prompt, whatever it says |
| No memory card, said with a card in the slot | Gone at the controller, or gone at the pads | Chip-level work from this point |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Your card is not worked on. A bit-for-bit clone comes off it, the original goes into a sleeve, and every operation after that runs against the clone.
That image is what the repair work is done to. Where the file tables can be rebuilt, folder names come home with the pictures; where too little index survives, files are recognised by the bytes they begin with and lifted out individually. At that stage RAW behaves exactly as JPEG does.
There is nothing worth knowing in a file count. Each recovered image is opened by hand, and every one must render whole, at the dimensions the camera wrote.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
A figure nobody actually holds: nobody has a dependable count of the counterfeit cards in circulation. Makers and labs alike describe it as widespread, we see plenty, and each confident percentage in print started life as an estimate. The true number would change nothing anyway: data written beyond a faked card's real capacity is nowhere for anybody to find.
A 512GB SanDisk read as empty first thing in the morning; by the end of the job every frame was back. The card itself was never written to — a clone came off it and every attempt after that ran against the copy. Rebuilding the file system accounted for most of it, and a deep carve picked up the images whose directory entries had gone. The client stayed with the photographer.
Don't. A format lays down a clean index right on top of the entries that carry names, folders and dates, and whatever comes through afterwards arrives as an unnamed heap of numbers. Left alone, the card gives back much more of its original shape along with the pictures.
RAW too. What carving keys on is the signature at the start of each file — RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF and CR3 each begin with one, and video wrappers are built on the same idea. Plenty of this bench's work arrives from people who shoot for a living.
Often not. One die holds everything on a modern card, so it comes down to whether the break crossed it. Where it did not, the pads remain reachable directly. Either way the card itself is scrap — it is the pictures that matter.
Quicker than anything else we handle. Two or three working days sends most cards home, and less than that when a deadline is close. Give us the date you have to hit and the work gets scheduled back from it.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.