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.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Tim Browse]

See, that's why in the UK we tend to smile at jokes about us having lots of weird small cars. :-)

Where I live in the US, regular gas (I think it's 87? 88?) is $2.89/ gallon on a good day, up to about $3.05. My car's pretty gas efficient, and I get 300 miles on about $35.

My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor that did 35+ mpg, ffs.

My mother's car costs closer to $60 for the same distance.

14 mpg?! Holy crap. What is it, a Chieftain tank?!

Never mind game console standby power usage, get your car manufacturers to sort out their fuel efficiency. If you had to pay UK prices at the pump, I'm guessing that might accelerate the process :-)

Of course, in the UK, the cost of petrol is largely taxation. It's something like 75% of the price, which usually gets people going.

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:Always performance, never durability

[gowen]

If you take 10,000 photos between taking a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo and backing it up onto a tougher media, you pretty much deserve to lose all your work. The biggest loss of digital camera images are caused by loss/theft of the camera, and user error (accidental deletion). Media failure doesn't even register on the scale.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Everyone already uses the Rob Galbraith tables!

[Strolls]

In the Photography Forums that I tend to read we get the "which CFcard is best" question several times a week and everyone always refers the poster to the tables from the Rob Galbraith test last year. They actually have a number of different pages, having tested cards with a number of different cameras, but that doesn't matter, nor does the fact that it's currently a little out of date - the salient fact is that for many of the expensive flash memory cards the bottleneck is the camera's write speed.

I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.

So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.

Stroller.