My PowerShot S400 finally arrived today at work. After waiting an agonizing 2 hours for the battery to charge, I plugged in my 512MB CF and formatted it. Took a few snaps and everything was peachy. Took the CF card out of the camera and plugged it into a Lexar brand PCMCIA -> CF adapter. WindowsXP cannot read the card properly. It has the files on there, but it cannot read the data properly. great!

I took the scrawny 32MB card that came with the camera and give that a whirl. It works fine.

The 512MB card is read fine in the S400 (you can view the pics on it). My assumption is because the card is 512MB, the camera is formatting the card in FAT32. But my understanding of CF is that the memory controller is built onto the CF card meaning that any size is supported as long as your device can read/write to the filesystem. Now, I know WinXP can read FAT32 so my next assumption is the Lexar PCMCIA adapter is somehow mucking things up. Unfortunately I cannot force the 512 to format as FAT16 in the camera or in Windows. Check out the attachment. Aparently Windows thinks this CF card is actually 750GB big.

Anyone ever hear about a problem with PCMCIA adapters, or am I doomed to use the f*cking cable to download photos?

The only times I've had problems with reading CF cards in a card-reader is when the drivers were screwed up. Didn't have anything to do with the card's format. At one point, I had to service-pack Windows 2000 to get it to work with my current SanDisk CF reader, but after that, it was fine.

Sounds interesting, but the 32MB card that came with the camera works perfectly with the PCMCIA adapter.

I have a USB reader at home I can try, but that's not for another 2 hours.

Sounds interesting, but the 32MB card that came with the camera works perfectly with the PCMCIA adapter.

Maybe that adapter just doesn't work with cards that big? I find it hard to believe that the camera would be screwing up the format of the card.

I was plugging the PCMCIA adapter into a PCMCIA -> USB adapter. To make sure this wasn't the culprit, I stuck the CF -> PCMCIA adapter into a laptop. Thankfully, it works fine. So I guess it's this POS usb thingy. Oh well. Thanks for the help Tony, but I think I'll be fine (no heart attack).

EDIT: The S400 formats the card as FAT16 in case you were keeping score

I have an S400 as well, got it about a month ago. But according the the manual it 'officially' only supports 256MB CF cards so I held off on buying a new card for a while. Good to know that you have it working with 512MB. btw. what brand CF card did you use?

I got this Transcend one. It was advertised as 30x (if that actually means anything) and was priced right. Seems pretty snappy.

The S400 fortmats it at 490MB, so it seems it's fully supported.

I can recommend the transcends as well, I got a 512Mb one for my Canon EOS-10D. Performs very nicely, just need a USB2 or Firewire card reader now...