Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Are all Memory Cards Created Equal?

I used to think that I should just get the cheapest one out there.  Then I thought ok, what about the fastest one? And then I ran into another very "scientific" article.  I appreciate Rob Galbraith's work on this subject.  He took out a lot of the guess work for me.  He takes into account the speed of your camera bus and then the speed of your card.  Right now I'm using a Transcend 4GB 300x and my backup is an Sandisk Extreme III.  Usually I'm OK unless I decide to shoot RAW.  Then I really choose my shots more carefully or I end up doing a lot more deleting on the fly.  

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5 comments:

  1. d.pMay 20, 2009 at 10:37 AM

    Thanks for these articles! They're interesting to me AHHAHA nerding out.

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  2. JohnMay 20, 2009 at 10:50 AM

    ask kevan, i love nerding out. i'm working on a post about vr/is. have some nice comparison shots coming

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  3. mauriceMay 21, 2009 at 2:26 PM

    John hy, you are the consummate nerd, though you don't look it (AND you were a history major! go figure).

    I just go with the CostCo special, it's a 4gb Ultra II - stone ages =) takes a bit longer to download from, but only cost me $10! I figure it doesn't affect image quality =D if I were still shooting weddings it would probably not be fast enough.

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  4. kevanMay 21, 2009 at 3:33 PM

    James Duncan Davidson writes an article he calls Flashonomics, looking at performance per cost per GB: http://bit.ly/u2B6X. Consider that my contribution to the conversation: pointing at someone else's expertise and hard work.

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  5. mauriceMay 29, 2009 at 1:47 PM

    Nice link kevan. Very thorough. His advice is measured based on use case and makes a lot of sense.

    One more geeky thing about memory cards: the top-of-the-line pro bodies take 2 cards at a time, and can write in tandem. i.e., a 2-disk Raid 1, where each image is written to both cards. In that scenario, probably brand-name reliability is less of a concern, since you have a backup.

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