What fun we have had with this camera today. Not content with my old Nikon D50 and newer and hardly used Canon 1100D, Claire has her own DSLR.
She's not used it for a while as she sort of "fell out of love" with carrying a huge and to be honest, heavy camera around.
Part of the problem was that that way after the warranty had run out the OEM lens packed up. The motor for the autofocus stopped working. It was fixed once at Jessops camera shop but it failed again. I sourced a replacement Sony lens for her years ago from eBay. It's a 18-70 zoom. It's very limited with a maximum aperture of 5.6. In low light it is shite.
So yesterday I got it out, found the battery charger block and we charged the battery up to 100%.
Today she took some test photos to see reacquaint herself with it working. That went off pretty well and she has some nice garden photos.
That's when the problems started. We have two laptops. Both Dell. Both WIN10. They are both old and slow, so you would expect that older laptops would cope with Compact Flash cards. She has a selection of cards that I used to use as well in my now dear departed Canon 300D.
The simple job of putting the CF card into the adapter and plugging that into the USB-A port on the laptop proved no good. Even though AVG Anti-Virus checked the drive for any malware, it wouldn't show in Windows Explorer.
I dug out the newer bit still old Dell out. Same.
We both have MS Surface tablets running WIN11. Nope. Same. These only have a USB-C port on them.
It seems the problem lies with Compact Flash. I use Micro-SD cards in the SD card sized adapter and they work perfectly. I sometimes use the SD card port on the laptops with no problems.
To work around the problem I tried the CF card from the camera in my Motorola G50 phone. It also only has a USB-C charging and OTG port. Success.
I was able to copy them onto the Micro SD card in the phone and then back out to 64GB SanDisk Micro SD for her to put into her phone.
It was long winded but worked. Of course, I have Googled the problem but none of the proffered solutions match anything on any of the Windows units! Device Manager - make sure the CF Express entry is ticked and not showing an exclamation mark! There is no CF Express!
I wonder if the solution would be to get a CF card adapter that will take an SD card to fool the camera into writing to the SD card....?
Looking back on the "Canon 300D" tag I remember I tried this setup. Can I find the CF to SD adapter. Can I heck.
https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/a-mount-body-dslr-a300-series/dslr-a300/specifications
https://www.photoreview.com.au/reviews/dslr-cameras/entry-level/sony-dslr-a300/
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