A long time a go I began to notice that my Canon Rebel XT was "skipping" some pictures. That is, I shot something, I reviewed it on the camera screen, but later it was gone, nowhere to be found! I haven't found anything similar in the forums where I looked. Since I used and abused the equipment, I began to think that it could be copper dust (yeah, we've been to some harsh places) making a short-circuit, or something. I cleaned the CD card contacts, I formatted the card, I reset the camera, but every once in a while it would skip a picture. Not the sequential number, but it wouldn't keep the picture. Well, to make a short story long (sic), today the camera "stopped" at a picture number - I shot and reviewed a picture, but the next shot would be the same number and the *new* picture. Aha! The picture is being kept "somewhere" prior to recording in the card, because I can actually view it in the camera screen... I formatted the card and reproduced the error, then used Active Undelete to find the lost frame but, alas, there was nil! (I also tried recording both RAW and JPEG at the same time, with identical results). Incidentally, I was trying something specific with the flash. Then I changed the unit and... It seems that the culprit all this years has been the Sunpac 433AF. Every picture lost (from memory) was with this unit in function. So I tried with a Vivitar and Albinar (dedicated for Minolta) and everything goes smooth again. I remember this Sunpac stopped working altogether at one time and I had a great afternoon tearing it apart and then putting it back after I didn't find anything wrong. When I finished, the flash was just working again, so I had a glass of wine and forgot the incident. This happened after I started having problems, so I wonder if it was an indication of something. I'm not throwing it away, but will solely use it with a cheap passive photocell slave. In any case, I think this goes to prove the butterfly effect, which in turn calls for an ice cream! Now I'll try to get the ex430 II... Or maybe go back to Nikon ;) Cheers! **************** Alberto Tirado
