I have a trail cam that is 3-4 years old it has worked great. In the last year I have had 3 chips go bad in that camera. It works great for a couple of months and then one day there are no images on the chip. I put the chip in a regular camera and the camera functions and takes pics with no indication of an error but when I go to check the pics it says no image. Anyone hear of a camera damaging a chip or have I simply had bad luck with bad chips?
I personally haven't had this problem. I thought I did at one point in time. My SD cards would seem to have little to no memory left on the card even after I would delete all the files from it. I actually threw a few cards away thinking the cards were bad. Come to find out, even though I had no files on the card I didn't realize that the "trash" files were still attached to the SD card- even though there were not showing up. For this reason now whenever I erase / delete images from any SD memory card I will empty trash while the card is still connected. By doing so it erases all files from the card and I am able to get full memory capacity. I had this issue with older cameras - ones that would only except 2GB Sd cards. Once I realized the issue, i haven't had any problems. The deleted or trashed files are so small that after a few years of never empting the trash while the card is still connected to your computer, the accumulation of all the files take up all your storage space on the card, making it seem like the card is bad. This may not pertain to your issue directly. At least it is another option to rule out.
I have never formatted a chip, slap them in and they record pictures. I view my cards with my cannon camera, and delete every time. I never cross use chips between cameras. I get thousands of pics and months 2-3 out of the chip and only with that camera
