Sandisk Bargains

A couple of months ago i was going to order some bigger capacity Sandisk CF cards for my D3s, I held off as i thought that the new D800 was about to be announced and wanted to know if that would have CF or SD card slots, Well i am glad that i waited as last week the price of the CF cards tumbled, A new 16GB Extreme pro (90mb/sec) is now down to $66 at BH Photovideo and i will be ordering a couple before the stocks run out, Now you may wonder why the cards have dropped so much so quickly, Maybe there is a new faster card coming out and you may be right but the Extreme pro is faster than most cameras can handle but you gain with the download speeds, I certainly wish that they were this price when i went to Japan earlier this year and i am sure i lost some shots by having to change cards over when the going was fast and furious,
A quick garden update and the dog problem is getting worse, Last night the big hunting type dog chased the deer away and then this morning 2 other dogs appeared twice, So i will need to replace the fence that the builder took down and quickly before the animals are perminantly spooked or my own dog gets attacked, The bird numbers are increasing as are the species, A Northern Flicker has been hanging around the garden, I hear it more than see it and i had a white breasted Nuthatch on the feeder a couple of times today, Crows are in the garden most days and the numbers of morning doves have increased to six, We worked hard all weekend getting boxes emptied and i have been sorting the garage out today, The last of the new furniture arrives this week and then its job done and back to shooting and processing, Only 6 weeks before i am in Florida and boy will i enjoy the break, 2 days with Manatees and 3 days birding should get the cobwebs off the gear

Dave

Way back when........

......................I bought my first DSLR, I remember my first memory card was a 512mb Lexar, and I got a cracking deal on it at the Focus show at the time.

The price had recently been slashed to a mere £95 for what was, IIRC, the fastest card, although obviously not the largest.  I think that was a 2GB card for about £500

Now at the risk of ending up like we are in a Monty Python Sketch, it would be great to hear of what you paid for your first card and what size it was -  so why not leave us some comments.

Which brings me on to my current way of thinking, which has actually remained unchanged for the last two years.

I generally use 4GB Sandisk Extreme 111 cards which cost about £17 two years ago.  I remember taking some out for Dave and Peter when I went to Switzerland.

Now that price for that card has remained pretty much the same although it is now a faster card with write speeds of 30x

Technology continues to move on, and cards are getting larger and larger, and write times are going through the roof, with up to 600x.

Now why would you want that.  Well I guess if you are a pro sports shooter, with a 10fps pro body, than you probably don't want buffer capacity to limit you, and if the card can keep up then, the more the merrier.

For wildlife, that may or may not be important to you.

On the two bodies I use, the 7D and 1Dmk111, faster cards would be an improvement on the 7D as the files are just about twice the size of the those on the Mark111 .  As I shoot RAW, those are big files.

However, my approach is that I very rarely machine gun anything.  I have found as I get to understand my subjects better, I can use the slower drive speeds and only press the shutter when needed.

For example, when I took these Short Eared Owl images this year, with the Mark 111 I was shooting at 5FPS and only a couple or three in a burst, and that was when the bird was at it's largest in the frame.

Whereas, other photographers nearby were busy machine gunning them to death long before and after I had taken mine - so maybe they would need the larger cards.

Back to Compact flash cards, and it seems the 600x write speed cards are available in 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes.  This is now truly on an epic scale when I think back to my first card purchase, although with prices of £145, 260 and 480 respectively, they are at prices to match.

So on that basis, I am happy to stay with 4GB Sandisk 111 for both bodies for the time being.

Martin

New Monster speed CF Cards

Sandisk,Transend and Photofast have all announced super speed CF cards-full details here

Reviews - Digital Film

Digital Film comes in various forms, the most common or popular being CF or compact flash cards and the SD or secure digital cards. These have replaced the old microdrives which were the cheap CF card of its day but as they had moving parts they were unreliable (and slow) and with the drop in price of CF/SD cards its days were numbered. It wasn't that long ago when you could say that you would pay about £100+ per 1GB but these days cards are much cheaper and there is no reason to not have sufficient for at least a full days shooting. I now carry around 30GB of CF cards on me (My Nikon bodies only take CF) so this means that even on the 'best' days I wont run short.
I remember going abroad to shoot and having to carry in excess of 100 rolls of slide film with me- but now a handful of cards and a downloader and you are set. One thing that you must be careful of is when inserting your card into the camera, if it is not 100% straight it can and will bend the pins inside the camera body meaning a trip to the repairers.When downloading you can simply plug the camera body into your PC and do a direct download, but I prefer to take the card out and download from a CF card reader (readers are available for all types of card) Using a firewire downloader you can download your images straight into the PC very fast, USB2 downloaders are excellent if you have a camera under 10MP but once you are over 10MP and the file sizes are very large a firewire downloader is the fastest way, There are various manufacturers of cards Sandisk and Lexar are probably the biggest names followed by Kingston and various others, I would advise to go with a good make and not penny pinch on some cheap card that nobody has heard of. I have used Sandisk from the start and with their lifetime guarantee and free recovery software I cant see that changing soon. Most bodies will take 1 card but some pro bodies take 2 - either 2 CF or 1 CF and 1 SD card,

This can be a bonus as you can either use the 2nd card as a back up, shooting RAW files to 1 card and Jpegs to the other or have the second card for over spill so if you have 2x4GB cards in, you can shoot 8 GB of images without having to swap cards over-Great! With cards now up to 32 GB that means you could have 64GB of cards in one camera body-Now I wouldn't advise anybody to do this as that a lot of images and if a card get corrupted in any way you could lose an awful lot of shots. I keep my cards down to a max. of 4GB in a 12 MP body. If I was using a body over 20MP I may go to 8GB cards.

CF/SD cards can be confusing- so which one to buy and what are the numbers on them? As I have said I buy Sandisk, but there are many in the range from the Ultra range to the Extreme range. At this moment in time, the Sandisk Extreme 111 is by far the best value card around in my opinion, I would recommend this card to anybody no matter what camera they use.

The original Extreme 111 was rated at 20MB/S but the new ones are rated at 30MB/S whilst the Extreme IV's are rated at 45MB/s. What does that mean? - well its the speed that the images could be uploaded and downloaded to and from your camera. Some card manufacturers rate their cards but X speed, Lexar for example rate theres at 133x or 300x. If you have a 10 year old digital body you wont need the fastest cards and will be wasting your money if you buy them as there will limitations on the uploading speed of an old or budget camera, however if you have a fast PC/Mac and a fast card reader you will still be able to upload to the PC/MAC quickly. Rob Galbraith has spent some time doing charts that show the downloading speeds of the current range of cards and his site is well worth a vist if you need more info on what cards to use.
See Perfomance Chart here

Dave