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Well, some of you might want to buy  memory cards and if you already have one, you would probably be thinking about replacing or upgrading your memory. In this article, we will help you by giving a few tips on buying  memory cards for your camera.

Memory card type

First of all, before you buy it  online or from the shop, you need to know what type of memory card your camera uses. For example, my Canon EOS 400D uses Compact Flash (Type I or II) type of memory card while a Nikon D80 uses a SD/SDHC.

Tips: Remember that NOT all camera uses the same type of memory card!

Here’s a link on good example of diagram on showing the difference between one storage media (memory card) than the other.

Size

How big should the size be? And by big, we mean (capacity wise). This would be the biggest problem of all time. If you are like me, in which case you only take pictures depending on your mood and is quite efficient in transferring it to your computer, than 1 or 2GB is enough. If you love taking photographs and don’t want to be worried anout running out of storage, you might want to consider 4GB or 8GB. Then it also depends on your Camera, the more the megapixel, the more MB a picture would require. A nikon D3x’s RAW pic file is almost 50MB for 1 picture. So thats definitely something to consider. Next is your workflow. Do you shoot in RAW, FINE Large JPEG, or RAW+JPEG? Shooting in RAW takes up a hella lot of memory as thats uncompressed data of an image, compared to a compressed image file such as JPEG.

Tips: The file size of 1 medium sized JPEG picture is about 1.3 MB,and 1GB equals to 1000MB. So i I guess you can calculate the approximate memory size required for your usage. However, the speed of file transfer should also be considered, which we will discuss in the next point.

Speed

The picture above shows the 8GB SanDisk Extreme IV CF memory card. Well, if you look carefully there’s a 45MB/s which allow file transfer of 45MB per second. It’s about 45 pictures of size 1MB in 1 second and this is what we are talking about. If you have like 1000 pictures, not having a fast speed memory card will require you to wait for a long time. Notice above the 8GB  print is the initials UDMA, to use this card your DSLR must be able to support UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Acces) type cards, which high end cameras have, not all cameras support this function. And were talking about Nikon D3 or nikon D3x and the Canon equivalent. Personally i use a Sandisk extreme 3 8GB CF card. Unless you’re working in a hurry or is constantly uploading thousands of pictures, you dont really need a fast card.

Tips: Speed (of file transfer) is crucial when you have big size of memory card.

So, I guess that’s all for now, thank you for reading and if you have a camera, could you please vote the size of memory card that you have. Thanks and see you next time!

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