PHOTOGRAPHIC THREADS: camera queries, any photo tech stuff!

[David Shaw]

In order to store print sized pictures on my camera whilst away on holiday I have started to look at 2Gb cards. Why is it that some that are suitable are in the price range £12 to £15 and others cost £25 to £30? These were on the Tesco rack and the information given seemed to be identical. Is there any benefit in paying the higher price?

[ranunculus]

David, you can buy adequate 8Gb cards for less than those 2Gb cards in Tesco!

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&source=hp&q=8gb+sd+card&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=10630702064500389780&ei=OVLXSu-RFNzOjAenioHdCA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB0Q8wIwAw#ps-sellers

[Carlo]

I've always favored staying with a known brand...here the best would be SanDisk or Lexar. That said, prices can vary on those as well. I use SanDisk Extreme III 8 gig and 2 gig. There are newer and bigger cards available, but I haven't had to replace a single one.

[ranunculus]

I've always favored staying with a known brand...

I agree totally, Carlo - but Tesco sell their own brand cards and I'm certain that Kingston would be as reliable as those?   I use a reasonable variety of cards (inexpensive Christmas presents from the grandchildren; expensive cards for important projects, etc.) and I also haven't had one fail on me (touch wood).  Incidentally, I also use both Nikon and cheap imitation batteries and the only one of those to fail was the genuine article.

[Eric Locke]

Hi All

Best and by far the cheapest place to purchase memory cards (and many other things too)
is 7dayshop.com   Give them a try.

Eric

[ranunculus]

I have been thinking about David's query and it may be more sensible to tackle the problem from a different perspective?  Instead of concentrating on utilising these cards as 'reusable' media perhaps David might consider buying less expensive 8Gb cards and retaining them as back-ups for each individual holiday, botanising tour, etc.?
For less than the price of one 36 shot transparency film, he could capture over 1000 images (on Fine) and have all his original images stored independently on the ultimate space-saving media that could, if necessary, always be reused in the future? 

[David Shaw]

Thanks for the responses, all. Cliff's latest idea also seems a lot easier than backing up the pictures onto CD. From responses, I assume that prce does not have much to do with quality and so it is OK to order the cheapest.

[Paddy Tobin]

An external hard drive would also provide a cheap back up for photograph storage. Quite cheap at the  moment.

Paddy

[Ed Alverson]

David, you can buy adequate 8Gb cards for less than those 2Gb cards in Tesco!

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?hl=en&source=hp&q=8gb+sd+card&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=10630702064500389780&ei=OVLXSu-RFNzOjAenioHdCA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB0Q8wIwAw#ps-sellers

You should check to make sure that your camera is compatible with SDHC memory cards, which are the cards that have the higher capacity.  I ran into this problem while on vacation this summer; I bought an 8 GB SDHC card for her older Canon point-and-shoot, but when it wouldn't work  I wondered why.  The design, shape, and markings on the cad are the same, except for the extra "HD" on the card and packaging.  We had to go back to the store and return it and then buy a 2 GB regular SD memory card, which turned out to be a bit of a hassle.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital for more info.

My understanding is that CD's or DVD's are the most reliable archival storage medium for digital photography; memory cards and external hard drives are both subject to some probability of failure, especially as they age.  This is a real issue for me, being a long time loyal Kodachrome user...

Ed

[mark smyth]

My 8GB card cost under £10 if I remember correctly.

This reminds me to ask again - why doesn't my PC recognise my 8GB SD card? I have slots for cards on the front of my computer. Compact Flash is OK as are various sizes of SD cards

I can vouch for 7dayshop. They have some excellent offers just now for memory sticks
http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/default.php?cat=6&type=0&man=0&filterwords=&go=SEARCH&comp=

[mark smyth]

One more plug. Offtek for memory
http://www.offtek.co.uk/

[ChrisB]

I saw an advert in the Guardian for a digital microscope that allows you to download into your computer, just like from a camera.  Just wondered if anyone knows whether this would give more detail of flowers?

[Maggi Young]

Chris, Ian Pryde was speaking to Ian about a version of this he had seen advertised, much more expensive... then he saw this Guardian offer and sent for it... thinks it's great.... I'm not sure if he thinks he will go for the other option, to get mbetter lens etc.... perhaps  he will read this and report himself?

[Pascal B]

Why is it that some that are suitable are in the price range £12 to £15 and others cost £25 to £30? These were on the Tesco rack and the information given seemed to be identical. Is there any benefit in paying the higher price?

Reliability, speed. Those 2 are the most important factors for price differences. By speed I mean the speed in which the card accepts and releases data. In general the higher speeds are only interesting for those that photograph in burst mode and take many pictures after another. Point-and-shoot models generally don't have these settings. Higher speeds are also interesting for people that are not patient when they download the pix from the card to the harddrive. Speeds are mostely noted as "133x", "400x" or "class ..". The higher numbers, the faster the cards. Even with high megapixel digital SLR 133x speed is enough to write from the camera buffer to the card.

Reliability is not only in terms of tolerance of heat and air humidity level but also extra features within the cards that are for dataprotection or datarecovery. In general professional photographers stick to the more upmarket brands like SanDisk and Lexar. Although there are many, many brands of memory cards, there are only a handful of manufacturers that produce the memory chips that are inside the cards. Samsung being one of the bigger players and most are located in Taiwan. Kingston for instance does not produce its own memory chips, it buys them and puts them in a casing with their own software and extra features. The chips themselves also come in different qualities hence the different prices and choices apart from the actual memory size.

You also can't always use the higher capacity memory cards in every camera. The camera needs to be able to "see" the larger amount of memory and write to it. If the camera doesn't support the higher capacity cards it might be worthwhile to visit the website of the camera manufacturer to see if there are any new firmware upgrades available for that model to dowload. Firmware upgrades are made available by manufacturers to keep their cameras up to date within the limits of the technical design of that model. A large part of a digital camera is software and by upgrading this software it might be the higher capacity cards will be recognised and can be written to.

Contrary to what is said, there is NO true reliable back-up medium. The best thing to do is store important pictures at different locations and on different media. How reliable a CD is for instance depends on the brand of the CD and the brand of the writer used to back-up. A picture backed-up with a Plextor writer on Imation will last a lot longer than on a Tesco CD written with an el cheapo CD writer. ANY media degrades over time. A CD/DVD consists of a metallic layer and a polymer outside. This polymer is just a form of plastic and plastic degrades through enviromental influences. So CD's can also become unreadable. The quality of the polymer and the accuracy of the writer that burned the "holes" in the metallic layer of the CD determines the duration of the backup on CD. Harddrives are based on magnetism, that also degrades over time. And every time data is written to or from a memory chip these read/write actions degrade the chip too.

When I do fieldwork I have 3 Sandisk Extreme IV cards with me and everytime I have filled them up I download them onto a hard drive based portable imagetank (Epson P-series), that could be in the middle of Nepal. I rather use 3 4GB cards then one 16 Gb, even from a very reliable manufacturer like Sandisk. If I only have 1 big card and that fails when I am in the middle of nowhere, I have a serious problem....When I am back in civilisation I download the pictures as soon as I can on the harddrive of 2 computers and after imageprocessing I write it to DVD too. One copy is stored as fail safe at my parents house.

[ChrisB]

The one I've seen advertised is in the Radio Times, its £29.99 and magnifies 200 times.  Looks like a pen to hold, and says you can download into your computer using a hub.  I'd be fascinated to see some images thus produced....