Digital Camera Memory Card – How Big Do You Need

By Ryanita

Camera Memory CardsThe Digital Camera Memory Card is where you store your images until you transfer them to your computer. You will find many different memory cards that have different capacities for holding images. Professionals may need the two gigabyte or the four gigabyte memory card by Transcend. Fuji also makes a memory card with 512 megabytes, one gigabyte and two gigabytes. The digital camera memory card will hold so many pictures depending on the size and the resolution you are shooting the images in at the time. The digital camera memory card will hold different amounts of images. The higher the megapixels the less the memory card will hold. There is the multimedia, SmartMedia, xD memory cards, secure Digital, MemoryStick and CompactFlash memory cards to choose from when you are looking for storage.

Choosing the Best Memory Card For Your Digital Camera

Which brand of memory card should I buy? How big of a card do I need? Is one large card better than multiple small cards? Does the speed rating of the card matter?

Memory Card Reliability

The first thing to look at is the memory card it self. Most entry level and amateur level cameras use SD (Secure Digital) memory cards. Most professional and prosumer cameras use CF (Compact Flash cards). In general, Compact Flash cards tend to cost more, but offer higher read/write speeds, larger capacities and be less prone to failure than the Secure Digital Cards. This article will focus on those two card types.

One important note: there are many fake SanDisk cards in the marketplace. Some of these are cheaper manufacturers cards with SanDisk stickers and packaging. There are many, many millions of these cards in circulation today. If you remove the card from the camera before the camera has finished writing the data, you’ll lose images that the camera hasn’t completed writing. It’s very easy to accidentally format a card, especially if you use multiple cards. There are reports of certain software applications importing the images from the card, then the user deleting the card, only to find that the application only imported the thumbnail JPEGs that were embedded into the RAW image files, not the actual RAW image files.

Card Sizes: One Large Card vs. Multiple Small Cards

On a Nikon D200 containing a blank 8Gb SanDisk card, the camera claims 480 shots are available for RAW shooting. My Nikon D300 regularly gets around 700 shots on an 8Gb card using Lossless Compressed NEF files. If you select RAW plus Fine JPEG, it shows 354 shots available. There are conflicting opinions as to if one large card is better, or if many smaller cards are. The argument for smaller cards is, that if your card fails or you drop your camera in the ocean, you lose less data. The argument for larger cards, is card failure is very rare, and largely recoverable. A 4Gb size card is ideal if you back up to DVD – it’s the largest card size that will completely fit onto a DVD, making the back up a simple drag and drop.

As larger cards become more common and prices drop further, we’ll go to larger sized cards.

Card Speed: How Fast Do I Need?

Memory cards come in a wide range of speeds, and the faster the card, the more expensive. How fast of a card you need depends on a number of items:

If you are uploading via cable from your camera, your upload speed is limited by the camera. For the absolute fastest uploads, use a card that supports UDMA (like the SanDisk Extreme IV’s, SanDisk Ducati’s, and Lexar 300x) in a FireWire reader. If you shoot landscape or take several minutes to compose each shot, then you don’t need a fast card. If you are shooting non-stop action and taking sequence after sequence at 8fps, you’ll need as fast a card as possible. The Ducati card will allow the camera to write the images to the card and clear the buffer in seconds.

If you take your time to compose each shot, and upload speed isn’t important to you, then memory card speed isn’t important.

Data Recovery Whether you’ve accidentally removed your memory card while the camera was still writing, deleted or formatted the wrong card, or the card has developed an error, it’s usually possible to retrieve some, if not all of the lost data.

The higher end cards from both SanDisk and Lexar come with their respective data recovery software packages on CD.

May be you wanna read about My Other Guide at:

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