A Memory Card Torture Test

An anonymous reader writes "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards? If you want to find out how much better a high speed memory card is, check out this group test of high capacity compact flash and SD cards."

Comments

Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari?

What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?

(These are serious questions ...)

Rich.

19 Pages?

[gfxguy]

19 Pages? Ay Caramba!

Hint: skip to page 18 for the conclusions.

You don't get any more professional than padding your 3 page article to 19 pages with lines like this (from the conclusion):

You could say we tested a number of things.

Yeah, you could say that. One of those things was my patience.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[Rob the Bold]

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering. Of course if you work in black and white, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and use the cheap stuff. But with color, you don't want multipath blurring your color signals together. And this gets even more important as you shoot multiple frames per second.

And the same thing goes with your storage media. If you work in high resolution color, you need a RAID. That way, you can spread the put the color streams on different physical media to prevent color-bleed. This is even more critical with digital photography, just a one-bit bleed from one pixel to another can ruin a great photo.

So, by all means, get a cheap card if you are going analog black-and-white. But you get what you pay for if you are shooting high-res digital color.