CF memory card and airport scanners

[medea1]

I traveled through Calgary, London and Prague airports last week and ALL my CF memory cards got corrupted!! I put them through the scanner they use on the tray with my carry-on.
I never happened before. They may have some new devices installed there somewhere.
Anyone has some similar experience?

[SpacePhoenix]

How old are the cards? Maybe there is some internal insulation inside them which perhaps degrades over time

[medea1]

I had four cards on me. All 32 G
one Kingston about 1 year old, one Lexar about the same age and two Silicon Power I bought just 5 weeks ago.
All of them worked fine before the trip and all were unreadable after arrival home. "Error reading, card is corrupted" message.
Photoshop bridge, ACDSee or Windows could not recognize media.
Would not read even through D300 camera. Though I could view pictures on the card through camera viewer but unable to get them off.
After reformatting cards work just fine.

[medea1]

It is puzzling. Cards are new and variety of brands. Flying all the time and never had an issue either. They were fine before flight and corrupted right after. Never left my site. Stored in my photo hard case. Go figure.

[Sperlock]

Nope, I have never had this experience flying domestically or internationally.

[techno_guru]

I was once told by a pro photographer to ALWAYS format your cards after downloading your photos. Yes each and every time.

While it eats up battery life, did you try connecting your camera to your pc to download the images? Just a thought

I remember back in my film days, always asking fro a separate container for the TSA to use to hand scan my film, so their big Xray machine didnt damage my film. Maybe we should do that with our cards now too


Just some random thoughts from this keyboard

[Shaun(OfTheDead)]

Oh man, that's so terrible, medea1!

Sorry to hear that.

This is the first time I've heard of airport scanners messing up memory cards. I've travelled with memory cards (SD cards, though) in my pockets already, specifically to test if the scanners would ruin them, and they got through fine.

I guess the best thing you can do now is chalk this up to a learning experience. Maybe next time take the precaution of downloading your photographs onto your laptop or upload to a server before you fly.

[bulevardi]

That's terrible indeed... Hmm

Never got any problems (yet) with scanners though, even before I went digital, with film, never had complaints.

I never format my cards after downloading the photos neither.

Can't really figure out what the problem is.

Can you download/read the files? Or is that aswel a problem?
Maybe Nikon has some file restore software to repair corrupted files?

[Gladdy]

Terrible to hear about it, I was lucky so far, my cards passed the ray many times and always worked after it.

[dororai]

I transport my photo equipment 4-5 times each year through airport checkup and never encountered anything like this.
Very, very weird, I think you should check with the airport and maybe even file a complaint. :-)

[albertj]

Did you try some other card reader, or some other computer?