Memory Cards..Choice the Best !!

Memory Cards

You will need to get a memory card for your camera. Most cameras take SD, or Secure Digital, cards these days but some take Compact Flash. These are small, solid-state memory devices that are remarkably stable. These days, memory cards are pretty cheap – you can get a 64 GB card that will hold a huge number of pictures – for about $35. There are a lot of choices though, so I will try to narrow things down for you. The primary questions you face is what size, what speed, and what brand of card to choose. So let’s talk about those questions.

All you need to worry about with memory cards are the brand, size, and speed (in MB/second).

Get a larger card of around 32–64 gigabytes. It will hold thousands of pictures and should be all you need. Some photographers buy many smaller memory cards (in the range of 4–16 GB per card) rather than one card with a large amount of memory on it on the premise that if the card gets corrupted you only lose a relatively small amount of data. However, the odds of corruption are extremely slight. In fact, you are far more likely to have bad things happen to your card when it is outside of your camera (such as losing it, having it physically damaged, having it stolen, confusing it with another card and recording over it, etc.) than for it to be corrupted. For this reason, you are better off getting a large card and leaving it in your camera.

Next let’s talk about speed. Memory cards are rated by how fast data can be written to them. You will see many numbers and ratings on memory cards, but you can ignore all of them but one: the “MB/second” figure. That will tell you the maximum speed of the card.

Do you need a very fast card? That depends. If you primarily shoot only one or a few shots at a time, you have no real need for a fast memory card. Your camera has a certain amount of memory that stores pictures until they can be written to the memory card ..

(called a buffer), so the speed of the card won’t come into play. That is typically the case for those who shoot landscapes and urban scenes. If you are shooting sports or wildlife, however, and blasting away for a while in an effort to get the perfect shot, then you may need to get faster cards.

The final question is what brand card to buy. Most suggest that you limit your choices to the best brands of memory cards, which makes sense since the effects of something happening to your card can be catastrophic. Lexar or San Disk have been the industry leaders for some time and are generally considered the highest quality. I have used other brands for many years and never had a problem. As prices have come down, the difference in price is not that dramatic, so stick with San Disk or Lexar.

So what card should you buy? Again, it depends on your particular situation, but a suggestion at the moment is the Lexar Professional 64 GB card with a speed of 95 MB/second. It is only about $35 and covers all the bases.

Source : Getting Started in Photography,  By : Jim Hamel