I was looking around this morning to find a bigger memory card. I want to go back out to west Texas and shoot some video interviews and I hate stopping to change memory cards while I'm shooting video. I may be showing both my naieveté as well as my tenure in digital photography but I am astounded at being able to buy a 32 gigibyte, class 10 (for HD video) SD memory card for only $25.
I remember when memory cards were something you budgeted for and saved up for. Now big ones like these are no more expensive than two movie tickets for some trashy summer thriller. About the price of two rolls of film with processing and contact sheets...
I have a mixed collection of 4,8 and 16 gb SD cards from Transcend and so far, no failures. I got into the habit of formatting my cards before every use. Seems to work for me.
+1 to the formatting before use. I format with the camera, not the computer.
ReplyDeleteFormat -> Shoot -> Download to computer -> Copy images to more than one drive -> Card back in camera -> Format
Sam
Never format a memory card in your computer. Always format in your camera. And I would add, burn a copy to a non-magnetic medium such as a DVD or Blu-Ray DVD.
DeleteRecently bought a Raid1 NAS device, so the "copy images to more than one drive" is being dealt with automatically when my machine rsyncs with that new device each 4 hours.
DeleteBut yes Kirk, 32 Gig for 25$ is a killer value. Plus we also never had problems with Transcend cards. And your advice with the DVD is also a very good and valid one.
The cost comparison is one thing, the amount of space saved to carry a comparable amount of film is even more amazing.
ReplyDeleteKids today have no idea how easy they have it! Back in my day we used punch cards, and we liked it! We used 300 baud modems to program in basic on a mainframe, and we liked it!
ReplyDeleteI purchased a 1gb solid state card (type II) at one point after a couple failed microdrives made me paranoid. Price for the 1GB card: $1199.00!!!!! Has anything in history come down in price more than these cards??
ReplyDeleteJohn
John, when I started the digital journey CF cards were a gleam in some marketer's eye. We used PCMCIA storage. I remember dropping over a thousand dollars on one 512 meg card for a Kodak camera. Now I can buy a whole system for that.
DeleteIt really is amazing! I also recall buying my Nikon D1 for $5700 and then getting two 64mb cards for $350 each. It seemed like a great deal as you could shoot what i recall being more than the 36 frames from a roll of film, but you could reuse it over and over! Took forever to download one of those cards and burn a cd.
Deletejohn