Memory Card Questions

In ,
Alan Wonsowski scwibbled:
I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that I
will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?


The difference is the speed at which they can be read and written from/to.
The faster cards are the most expensive. Those who do 'machine gun'
photogrpahy generally benefit most from the faster cards. General and or
studio based photography is a bit overkill.

Try Rob Galbraiths website for the geeky stuff! ;-)
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...e.asp?cid=6007

hth
--
Nigel_H

Alan Wonsowski wrote:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

www.google.com: lexar sandisk review (and the innumerable variations)

www.robgalbraith.com

How many more reviews do you need?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?

www.lexar.com
www.sandisk.com

Opinions and insights will be welcomed.

Modern social science has shown that:

a) people who buy Lexar equipment are impotent limp-wristed wimpies,
b) people who buy Sandisk are virile, god-like hunks of masculinity.

at probability p=0.001 of being wrong, under assumptions of normality
etc. Who are you to question the F-test?

a) people who buy Lexar equipment are impotent limp-wristed wimpies,
b) people who buy Sandisk are virile, god-like hunks of masculinity.

that'ld make me a circus freak g

Toa

Sandisk Ultra II, Extreme III are the best cards

Vinnie



"Alan Wonsowski" wrote in message
...
I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that I
will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?

Opinions and insights will be welcomed.

Thanks,
Alan

"Alan Wonsowski" wrote in message
...
I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that I
will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?

Opinions and insights will be welcomed.

If you don't need the speed of even a base CF card, the microdrives are IMO
much better value. I think that the number of times in the last 5 years
I've wanted to shoot over 1 frame/second is 2 so I bought a 2 GB microdrive
and I'm absolutely happy with the capacity compared to flash-memory based
cards. Of course I did buy a 512MB CF card as a backup, spar and utility
since the software upgrades that Nikon publishes that you can do yourself
must use the CF card, not the microdrive (at least according to Nikon and
NO! I'm not going to try it to find out if it's true.)

Norm

Norm Dresner wrote:

"Alan Wonsowski" wrote in message
...
I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that
I will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II;
and Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards
within each brand?

Opinions and insights will be welcomed.

If you don't need the speed of even a base CF card, the microdrives
are IMO much better value. I think that the number of times in the
last 5 years I've wanted to shoot over 1 frame/second is 2 so I
bought a 2 GB microdrive and I'm absolutely happy with the capacity
compared to flash-memory based cards. Of course I did buy a 512MB CF
card as a backup, spar and utility since the software upgrades that
Nikon publishes that you can do yourself must use the CF card, not
the microdrive (at least according to Nikon and NO! I'm not going to
try it to find out if it's true.)

I'd stay far, far away from Microdrives. Flash is incredibly rugged;
Microdrives can lose all your data if dropped.

--
Albert Nurick | Nurick + Associates - Web Design
| eCommerce - Content Management
www.nurick.com | Web Applications - Hosting

flash, or can be read off later by computer. There is a noticeable,
but not great, difference in speed between the 40X and the 80X, which
is about the same speed as the Sandisk Ultra and Extreme cards. In
theory (and in specialized laboratory test), there is another visible
jump in speed from the Ultra II to Extreme III, but in practice (in
real cameras), the difference is too small to even notice. Buy Lexar
80X or Sandisk Ultra II.

If you want to see speed tests done with different cameras (different
cameras having different performance profiles with different chips),
try:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...e.asp?cid=6007

I did my own read and write tests with the basic Sandisk, Extreme 2's and a
cheap no name brand, the difference was only about 30 % across the lot, the
the specs on the better cards say that they are also more rugged and will
handle a larger range of temps etc.

In ,
snipped

I did my own read and write tests with the basic Sandisk, Extreme 2's and
a cheap no name brand, the difference was only about 30 % across the lot,
the the specs on the better cards say that they are also more rugged and
will handle a larger range of temps etc.

I would also strongly recommend following the camera manufacturer (or
dealer's) advice on which card to use with it. My Kodak DSLR/n wouldn't have
any truck with a FujiFilm 1GB CF Card, even though my computer would
read/write to it. Had to put in a Sandisk instead. Fuji wouldn't
admit/acknowledge any problems with their cards, but Kodak(UK) said they
couldn't get them to work, so they couldn't recommend them. Then I took the
camera in to a branch of PC World and they let me try out a cheapo no-name
brand (I cannot even recall the name now), and that worked just fine! Go
figure.

--
Nigel_H

In article ,
Alan Wonsowski wrote:
I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that I
will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

Well ... the Lexars recently had two different problems with
certain Cannon cameras which required both a fix in the camera's
firmware and a replacement of the Lexar card.

This latter part applied only to certain batch numbers of the
Lexar cards.

However, with a Nikon D70s, I doubt that it matters. I have a
D70, and two 1GB 80X Lexar cards, and have had no problems with them.

The selection between Lexar and Sandisk was made on the basis of
availability at the time of purchase (I got the Lexar 1GB 80X cards,
FWIW), but I have had no reason to regret it.

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?

The faster ones only make a significant difference under two
circumstances.

1) When you are taking batch mode photos, the camera shoots at a
certain number of frames per second, until the camera's buffer
memory is full, and then it slows down to the rate at which the
camera can transfer imagest to the CF card. If this is
important to you, you will want one of the faster cards offered
by whichever maker you select.

2) When you are transferring images from the card to the computer
for processing, you will need to wait a time proportional to the
percentage of full the card is, the size of the card, and the
speed of the card -- assuming that your interface to the
computer is fast enough. If it is a USB 1.x speed, the card's
speed won't make much difference. If it is USB 2.0, however,
or if you are using a PCMCIA adaptor, the speed of the card will
make a significant difference. If you just start it downloading
the images, and then go read something while it is downloading,
no problem. However, if you are waiting for the download to
finish so you can dig into processing (or at least examining)
the images, you can get to what you want to do much more quickly
if you have a faster card.

You have my opinions above.

Enjoy,
DoN.
--
Email: | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

In article ,
"Albert Nurick" wrote:

Microdrives can lose all your data if dropped.

I heard that microdrives are very convenient: If you drop one, you don't have
to pick it up.


JR