Lumix FZ-24 - SD card write protected only when using camera as card reader to PC..?

[acrobson]

I'm looking at somesones laptop and digital camera (Lumix FZ-48) and When they are trying to transer files or folders to and from the SD card plugged into a Lumix FZ48 it is reporting that write-protection is enabled.

 

This only occurs when transferring files using the USB cable between the PC/laptop and the digial camera. However it works fine when using a card reader, attached to a laptop or a external USB card reader.

 

This occurs on Windows XP, Vista SP1 & 2 and a Windows 7 machines so apepars to be an issue with the camera as appose to the PC/laptop it is connecting to.

 

It has been tried with 10 different SD cards of all capacity's, various manfactures both new and old and the 'write protection sliders/switches' on the side of the cards are set to the 'unlocked' position, however they have been tried in both the locked and unlocked state.

 

The switch's do appear to be functioning correctly as when they are set to the locked state they do report as being set to 'write protected' no-matter how you try and copy files to/from them.

 

Any ideas?

[gjdb]

As far as I know most camera`s have this 'problem', you can only read from internal or external memory, not write to it.

Why should you have write access anyway, its not an usb-stick or external hdd.

[localzuk]

Yup, as gjdb says, this seems to be normal behaviour. My EOS 500D does the same thing.

[acrobson]

Hi all,

 

Yeah thanks for the input. Later in the day after posting the thread and checking out Panasonic's FAQ pages it is normal behavior. The department are now using an external card reader. It seems they wanted to consolidate all of their many 4-8gb SD cards onto one low cost easy to mange 32gig SDHC card and transfer all their images onto that (as well as being backed-up on the network of course.....) However they were sure they had done it using the camera before and then realised it was a previous camera/different model.

 

So yes, the USB port on the camera is a read only USB port to prevent people inadvertently formatting/overwriting their SD card with all the images on in error etc etc.

 

 

 

Cheers, AC