Canon EOS 60D Manual page 21

Licensed to: CengageBrain User
How Many Shots Left? Guess!
If the EOS 60D has a serious flaw, my nomination is the camera's apparent inability to
tell you how many shots you have left. Of course, you know you have a great camera
when the counter that keeps track of the number of shots remaining is its most annoy-
ing defect. What's the deal? The counter on the monochrome LCD tops out at a measly
999 shots, which is a ridiculously low number given the capacity of modern memory
cards. With an 18-megapixel camera like the 60D, a 4GB memory card is rather small.
(I've standardized on 32GB for my own work. Read about the "eggs/basket" myth in
Chapter 14.) If you use a modestly sized 4GB or 8GB card, it's almost inevitable that
the counter will indicate no more than 999 shots remaining if you're shooting JPEG
Fine or JPEG Standard—even though you may actually have much more capacity than
that remaining.
Fortunately, there is a workaround. The Quick Control screen has a counter that can
tally up to 9999 shots. Just press the INFO. button repeatedly until the Camera Settings
screen appears, and presto, your true number of shots remaining appears in the lower-
left corner. It's not as convenient as having the picture count appear on the monochrome
status LCD, but the display is better than being left totally in the dark.
To understand how your 60D's counter can overflow so easily, consider that an 8GB
card can hold about 1,186 JPEG Fine shots in full resolution (Large) format, but the
counter shows just 999 pictures remaining (as it also will for full resolution JPEG
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(Don't) Format in your computer. With the memory card inserted in a card reader
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or card slot in your computer, you can use Windows or Mac OS to reformat the
memory card. Don't! The operating system won't necessarily arrange the structure
of the card the way the 60D likes to see it (in computer terms, an incorrect file sys-
tem may be installed). The only way to ensure that the card has been properly for-
matted for your camera is to perform the format in the camera itself. The only
exception to this rule is when you have a seriously corrupted memory card that
your camera refuses to format. Sometimes it is possible to revive such a corrupted
card by allowing the operating system to reformat it first, then trying again in the
camera.
Set-up menu format. To use the recommended method to format a memory card,
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press the MENU button, rotate the Main Dial (located on top of the camera, just
behind the shutter release button), choose the Set-up 1 menu (which is represented
by a wrench icon with a single dot next to it), use the Quick Control Dial (that
round wheel to the right of the LCD) to navigate to the Format entry and press the
SET button in the center of the dial to access the Format screen. Rotate the Quick
Control Dial again to select OK and press the SET button one final time to begin
the format process.
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Chapter 1 Canon EOS 60D: Thinking Outside of the Box 19