BYTEMARKS
Even high-tech gadgets are fallible

By Burt Lum

I would equate my digital camera with a microwave oven. Life without either of them would be unimaginable — or so I thought before I faced my harsh Alaskan reality.

When traveling, my Canon Digital Elph goes where I go. I find nothing more gratifying than to view pictures on my laptop, just 2 minutes after I have taken them.

I kept the Digital Elph by my side, ready to capture the elusive photo opportunity on my maiden voyage to Alaska. Anchorage had 28 inches of snow in the 24 hours before my arrival. It was a winter wonderland, and scenic panorama jumped out from every street corner. Then, on a single-engine plane flight to a remote village called Tyonek, reality struck: My camera malfunctioned.

To my dismay, what failed was the Compact Flash, the small memory card that stores all the images. It was the last thing that I would have thought could go bad.

I had a spare card, but I left it in the hotel room, thinking I had more than enough memory for this outing. When I checked the file system of the card, it appeared the file allocation table was hosed. The whole trip would remain recorded only in my own memory.

Although advanced, recording media are not failure proof. There are Compact Flash, Smart Media and Memory Stick formats that can hold up to 1 gigabyte of memory. That's a lot of images to risk losing on a corrupted memory card.

I went to the manufacturer's Web site at www.lexarmedia.com to get tech support and chatted with a tech from "India," in a place called Hyderabad. (The guy told me India, but looking on the map, Hyderabad is in Pakistan. It's another cybermystery.) After reformatting the card, it still failed, so my only alternative was to return the card.

The response from Hyderabad was swift. I got my new card in four days.

As for my digital camera, I still won't leave home without it, but for backup, I'll bring my analog (i.e. film) device. ;-)

Reach Burt Lum at burt@brouhaha.net.