I purchased recently a used Nikon D5000, and have been acclimating myself to its features. I loused up the settings a few times, and to start from scratch, I did a Two-Button Reset plus a Hard Reset with the Paper Clip in the SD compartment plus a Custom Reset.
Now with the camera set completely at its default settings, and with the way I wanted it, I went to my local park, and snapped a bunch of test shots.
When I downloaded the images to my PC and proceeded to view them, lo and behold, the previous owner's name appeared in the Exif data under all the photos that I took.
Why didn't these resets erase ALL the data? Now all my test shots have the guy's name under them.
I called Nikon and asked the rep why this happened, and he replied that he was stumped.
Moreover, if the previous owner's name remained after all the resets, what is to say that the camera is truly reset? A hard reset should completely reset everything, and remove all previous data.
I never experienced this problem with any previous Nikon or other DSLR's that I owned.
I starting to feel that this is a fluke, and that the camera may never be completely reset under any circumstances.
Nowhere in the manual does it say that User Comments are retained no matter what type of reset you do. The Nikon Rep thought that the clock battery retains this info but the hard reset resets the clock but not the data? He was perplexed. He told me how to manually erase the User Comments but he thought that would have been erased with the Hard Reset.
What do you think?