Find the Right Memory Card for Your Camera

How to Find the Right Memory Card for Your Camera

July 8, 2012 3:51 pm / Posted by Bobby Hills to Camera Tips
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Getting yourself in a memory card muddle and not sure which card to buy? Finding the right memory card is not an easy thing for you as there are thousands of memory cards of hundreds of manufactures in a variety of storage capacities and speed classes. The following passage lists some factors you need to keep in mind when buying a memory card.

1. Capacity

If you're just starting out or just do photography as a part-time hobby then, generally speaking, the most important feature to look for when buying a card is the capacity. Most memory card manufacturers publish tables on their websites to show how many images you can save on the specific card. Different file types, compression and resolution all affect the size of each file, so the number of images you can put on one card from one camera to the next is never the same. Between 1GB and 8GB storage should be enough for an average beginner photographer using a compact camera and these won't break your bank either.

2. Speed

If you are an enthusiast and professional, you need to look for the speed of a card, as most DSLRs can produce large Raw files, shoot HD video or capture multiple shots in a single burst, the data streaming through the camera's buffer will need to be met by a card at the end that can 'match up' to its specification to receive all the information. (See below for how to work out the speeds of a card.)

Professionals should also look at how reliable a card is as you can't take the risk of losing all your photos. This can be worked out by Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF). SanDisk claims a MTBF of over 1,000,000 hours for its memory cards - that's almost 115 years before the average card is expected to fail.

Two types of card speed

A card's read speed describes how fast data can be retrieved from a card. This performance is seen when transferring card contents to computers and printers for example. A faster read speed will transfer images to your computer more rapidly also (depending on how the SD card is wired up to the computer, as a direct connection vs USB 2 vs FireWire 800 vs USB 3 will make a significant difference also, as will, potentially, your hard disk or SSD storage memory speed).

The write speed describes how fast images can be saved onto a card, which is important when shooting bursts of images in continuous shooting mode, HD video or when using high resolution cameras that shoot particularly large files.

Therefore if you're doing sports photography, especially with a high continuous burst shooting mode, you will need a card with a fast writing speed.

3. Memory Card Brand

What brand and type to use? For the brand, I'd really advice you to stick with the reputable brands (e.g., Lexar, Sandisk) and never ever buy cheap, counterfeited, "brand" cards. As with everything on the internet: if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't true. So stay away from those cheap eBay deals, promising you a brand card for half the normal price...

After talking about so much about how to choose the right memory card for your camera, I believe you already got a basic idea about choosing the right memory card. And there is another problem troubles most memory card users that is lost data from memory card. If you happened to encounter such problem I recommend you to use Card Data Recovery for Windows or Card Data Recovery for Mac to get your data back.

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