Digital Camera Memories

Friday, June 10, 2005

When I bought my digicam, I had spent all my time and effort researching the camera but never bothered to find out what memory to buy. Only when I was talking to the seller at the shop, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten about memories. Since I was buying the camera at that point, I did not want to wait for some more days to buy a memory card. So I had to settle for whatever the shop owner recommended.

A few days back, I noticed that I am burning my 1 gig card quickly in the field and I would definitely do with some more memory. Before deciding to buy one, I browsed around to learn about compact flash memory cards, different types, vendors and the best choices available in the market.

Here is a summary of what I understand.

* CF cards are the most common memories and type I is seem to better than type II. Microdrives are less expensive than CF cards but CF cards are more durable.
* Your camera may not be fast enough to write at the speeds offered by CF cards. Even if you buy 80x card paying lot of money, camera may not be writing faster than 40x
* SanDisk Ultra II cards seem to be a decent buy. Lexar is popular, but Canon has reported some issues with Lexar cards.

Some of the links I have gone through are here.

* Bob Atkins' excellent review on CF cards. Worth a read. He also describes his experiences with different card makers and what is the best buy.
* Steve's Digicams on Flash Cards and storage devices. Provides the basics and understanding of different types of memory avaialbe for digital cameras.
* DP Review's comparison of digital memories. A bit outdated.