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Which brand of memory card ought to I buy? Does it make a difference? How huge of a card do I need? Is one huge card better than multiple little cards? Does the speed rating of the card matter? This article was written to help answer these precise questions. Cameras and lenses may be without apparent effort replaced, exceptionally if they are insured. Those images from the three-week safari, your relatives wedding, or your summer long European tour, merely can’t. Memory Card Reliability The primary thing to look at is the memory card itself. Most entry level and novice 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, more prominent capacities and be less prone to failure than the Secure Digital Cards. This article will focus on those two card types. While there are a good deal of makers of memory card out there, the top tier, and the choice of the vast majority of pros, are SanDisk and Lexar. These are likewise the only two brands than Nikon tests with and recommends. SanDisk claims a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of over 1,000,000 hours – that’s closely 115 years before the intermediate card fails. Their cards are rated for over 10,000 insertions. A sophisticated defect and error management system may rewrite info from a wrong sector to a good sector on the fly. SanDisks built in Error Detection Code and Error Correction Code to try to recover corrupted selective information automatically. The regular (blue) SanDisk CF card has an operating temperature range from 0°C to 70°C (32°F to 158°F). The Extreme III cards are rated with an operating range of -25°C to 85°C (-13°F to 185°F). They may withstand a shock of 2,000G (or with regards to a 10 ft drop onto a concrete floor). Hard-drives may only withstand a 200-300G shock – a drop of less than 2 foot. SanDisk quote less than 1 non-recoverable error in each 10^14 bits read (or one error for each 12.5 terabytes of selective information – or one out of each million 12.5Mb RAW files, or one out of each three million Fine JPEGs). Overall the reliability from their Compact Flash cards is significantly better than even the best hard drives on the market today. One important note: there are some phony SanDisk cards in the marketplace. Some of these are for less makers cards with SanDisk stickers and packaging. Some are habit made with no quality control and put into SanDisk looking boxes. Our best advice, is to only buy from a reputable retailer like Amazon.com or BHPhotoVideo.com, and keep away from buying memory cards that appear too cheap, are for sale on eBay, or numerous market stall while journeying etc – stick to reputable origins that are authorized dealers. However, even with the best cards, errors do still occur. There are many, a lot of millions of these cards in circulation today. Look at any DSLR internet forum, and you’ll find reports of lost images. Most of these you’ll note are either with for less cards, potentially bogus SanDisk or Lexar cards, or caused by user error. 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 finished writing. It’s very easy to without intention format a card, peculiarly if you use multiple cards. There are reports of sure software apps 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 effigy files, not the actual RAW effigy files. In nearly all these cases, most of the images are recoverable using info recovery software. Bottom line, attempting to save $20 on a memory card for a camera/lens system that costs hundred or thousands of dollars makes very little sense. If you stick with the top tier brands, memory cards are very, very reliable, and they are far from the weakest link in the typical users workflow. Card Sizes: One Large Card vs. Multiple Small Cards How much card space you need depends on what format you shoot (RAW files are significantly more prominent than JPEG’s), and how a good deal of shots you are likely to take amid getting to a computer to clear off and backup the cards. If I’m traveling, I’ve commonly got a laptop with me so I may backup my cards each evening. Some days I may only take a dozen shots, but it’s likewise not unknown for me to take assorted thousand shots in a day if I’m at an event with a lot of action. On a Nikon D200 containing a blank 8Gb SanDisk card, the camera claims 480 shots are available for RAW shooting. This number is normally conservative, as the size of the RAW file varies. My Nikon D300 regularly gets around 700 shots on an 8Gb card using Lossless Compressed NEF files. If you switch the D200 to Fine JPEG, it shows 1,300 shots available. If you select RAW plus Fine JPEG, it shows 354 shots available. Your cameras manual will incorporate a table showing similar info for your peculiar model. There are conflicting views as to if one huge card is better, or if a lot of littler cards are. The argument for littler cards is, that if your card fails or you drop your camera in the ocean, you lose less data. The argument for more spectacular cards, is card failure is very rare, and largely recoverable. You likewise risk a much higher prospect of dropping a card, getting it wet, sitting on it, losing it, without advance planning erasing it, forgetting it or leaving it in your hotel room if you are managing multiple cards. There are other things to consider also. Uploading to computer may take a long time – putting in one huge card and leaving it to upload is a lot less work than swapping multiple littler cards and uploading each one manually. A 4Gb size card is idealisti if you back up to DVD – it’s the greatest card size that will exclusively fit onto a DVD, making the back up a simple drag and drop. There is no right or wrong answer, we’ve standardized on 8Gb Compact Flash cards – primarily because they hold a decent number of shots and commonly offer the best price per gigabyte. I’ll carry up to ten of them with me when I’m traveling. As more prominent cards become more mutual and prices drop further, we’ll go to larger sized cards. The most necessary thing is to make sure you have sufficient memory card space to last you until you may upload them to a computer – it’s better to have more than you need than not enough. Card Speed: How Fast Do I Need? Memory cards come in a wide range of speeds, and the more quickly the card, the more expensive. How fast of a card you need depends on a number of items:
If you take your time to compose each shot, and upload speed isn’t essential to you, then memory card speed isn’t important. If you are shooting action or sports and use a rapid frame rate frequently, then you want the quickest card, and camera, that you may afford. Data Recovery Whether you’ve without advance planning got rid of your memory card while the camera was still writing, deleted or formatted the faulty card, or the card has developed an error, it’s normally possible to retrieve some, if not all of the lost data. The higher end cards from both SanDisk and Lexar come with their respective selective information recovery software packages on CD. SanDisk’s is called RescuePro, and Lexar’s is called Image Rescue. Both are reputed to be very effective. A third part solution called PhotoRescue is also widely employed and reputedly better than both SanDisk’s and Lexar’s offerings, as luck would have it we’ve not had the need to find out. In Summary Your photos are infinitely more essential than your camera gear. By selecting the right memory cards and taking a few simple precautions, you may potentially save yourself from losing irreplaceable photographs due to the unforeseen events that hit us all occasionally.
161 of 162 people found the following review helpful. The guy at my local (100 year old) camera shop recommended I try one of these. I have removed all other cleaning items out of my bag except for one “cloth” that I use to clean the outside of my camera and this pen. Always start with the “brush” to brush away any grit or sand that could possibly scratch the lens. Then lightly, use the other side (felt) to clean away smudges and other marks. It’s quick, easy and unbelievably effective! I use it on my lenses, the LCD of my SLR and even my cell phone. The first one lasted me a year. I am on my second and recommend it everywhere I go. 63 of 64 people found the following review helpful. 46 of 47 people found the following review helpful. |
The only lens cleaning tool I keep with me