Nikon D90 and the CHA
Hardware January 6th, 2009
I took a SD card (4gig Sandisk Extreme III SDHC) out of my computer, and back into my camera, and I instead of a shot count in the LCD on the top of the camera, I got the letters CHA. What the? I headed to google, and “d90 CHA” brought back a ton of hits. This was not some weird isolated incident. Most were saying it had something to do with the memory card, and that if formated in camera, it would correct it’s self. Since I always format every time I put the card back in, that’s what I tried to do. I usually use the shortcut buttons, but they didn’t work. I then went to the menu, and it the camera seemed to take a long time to format. When it was finished, I still had CHA in the LCD. I took the card out, put it back in, and now the shot count said there were 27 pictures left. Weird. I tried the format again through the menu, and this time it only took a second, and appeared to work. We’ll see how this card holds up. I should mark it so I know which one it is.
This is the blog of Christopher Ward. He is a Canadian currently living in Minneapolis. Chris is a photographer and computer consultant.
I just had the same err msg and i think i found a solution. i took off the card from the camera and inserted it on my pc´s card reader to format it. after re-inserting it to the camera, i got the same err, but i tried to teka it of and then inserting it again, but this time, the came was “ON” during the procedure. after a couple of tries, there were no more err msg.
i´m using a 8GB Video HD SD card and i just took more then 100 pictures and re-formated it without any problem!
hope this will help you!
Not sure if the issues are with the cards, or the D90, but it sure is frustrating. I would hate to lose some images.
The problem is that the memory card has the little slider set to the lock position.
That may be the case for some people, but it wasn’t for me. Thanks.
I had the same error message CHA and just took out my memory card and put it back in and now it works fine
I bought a new D90 on 11th June & got this ERR CHA on just 8th days of the purchase. I removed the battery & put it back & the msg gone. I thought this would be the end of the story. But I got the same dreading msg again few days back & this time it wouldnt go away. Removing the battery will make it disappear, but then it would return every time I click a photo… I gave it to Nikon servicing.
The common thing in last time & this time was that the msg came after I move around the lens, so I guess it must be some lens contact issue. But this should NOT happen….
Bhavin, I forgot to mention, that if you have a lens contact issue, you will see “F–” on the screen. I have had that issue with my Tamron lens, but not my Nikon ones.
Have you tried a different card? Someone else commented here that I should unlock my card. That wasn’t my situation, but that is the message that you get when the card is locked, but it could also show if the camera doesn’t think it can write to the card for another reason I suppose. I have not seen the message for months now.
I got the CHA on a class 6 Transcend 4GB SDHC card…after I’d shot a ton of photos on it. Deal was I put it in my PC, and downloaded the pics into Picasa, w/the safe delete option – which means picasa copies and deletes the pics one by one. Put the card back in the D90 and got CHA. Got the same results as the blogger w/the camera formating options. So I put the card into my PC, did a quick format and it worked fine in the camera after that. It’s happened once before, but that’s all. I’m shocked about how many people seem to ship the camera for service. I have a stack of various SD cards so I always try them first before boxing up the D90.