can you help with my photography project?

Hi,

I am a design student currently in my third year of product design at the university of northampton and have a project whereby i am looking to design out waste within the area of digital memory cards and their packaging.

i am looking to design a unit that can store multiple memory cards in to eliminate the need of packaging for them in shops that would normally be thrown away. The rough idea is that when you purchase a camera you get a container, then when you wish to buy a new or extra card you take it to the shop and they put it in the container and thus eliminates the need to package them in the ways they are currently packaged.

I would like to know if you use digital photography, if you use multiple cards and formats, would a product like this be of interest to you, do you think it would work and are you bothered about the packaging a memory card comes in?

Any feedback that you could give would be of great help towards the development of my idea and project.

uh i guess i never even thought twice about it but i guess there is some waste there. however, i dont think i would carry a container to the stroe to get a memory card. i can barely keep track of my lens caps, the last thing i need is to have a memory card holder to keep track of. sorry but i think this is a pretty bad idea. sorry.

i lose the cases and throw all the packages on the floor of my car...lol

you wont find many photographers using different card formats, pretty much EVERYONE that is cool shoots on compact flash cards

I have discarded all of my memory card holders... they are a pain to deal with. I use compact flash cards, held in a simple folding wallet for easy access. The wallet would hold other formats of card just as well.

Therefore the unit you are looking to design may already exist - http://www.kinesisgear​.com/d.html or http://www.lowepro.com​:8080 …/series/dres/dr​esDMCH.htm

You just need to convince the memory card manufacturers and retailers to start supplying the cards without any packaging

---- Gavin

See if you can convince all of the manufacturers of any type of product to quit packaging items in tough plastic containers that require a knife or scissors to open and you'll be my hero for life.

Someday maybe I'll be cool, but for now I use both SD cards (Leica) and CF cards (Canon). I don't know if the packaging idea is good - they are packaged the way they are so that they are harder to steal. I remember when music CDs used to be packaged in boxes that were twice the size of a CD. They stopped doing that, so maybe there's hope for other products.

Maybe you could wrap them like a little mint and they would only be accessible from behind the counter from a dispenser that would take a number/code or swipe to dispense them, after a purchase has been made. A CF candy machine. Mmmmmmm!

Are you trying to describe a cartridge for (essentially unmounted) memory chips to go into or a replacement for the retail packaging (cardboard and plastic to present the product on a shelf)? I can't quite understand the point of your description.

If you are trying to design some sort of multiple-memory-chip cartridge, I would suggest that individual cards with the packaging of the chip(s) that we see now (the CF card as we know it, for example) are universal for a lot of different devices. A cartridge that only works with a particular model camera would eliminate the versatility of the memory card that we have now.

Welcome to the forum Adam.

For me the major drawbacks are:
- you have to remember to bring the container back to the shop when you buy a card
- more and more memory cards are sold through the Internet: they have to be packaged to be shipped
- the container would be bundled with the camera? Who would pay for that (the customer, the camera manufacturer or the memory card manufacturers)?
The customer would have to be very concerned about the environment to pay an extra fee for this container. I am not sure people are ready to pay a premium for that.
The camera manufacturer has no interest in paying for this object.
The card manufacturers have an interest (cheaper packaging costs), but they are many. And why would Sandisk pay for the container when the user will put Kingston cards in it...

What is the deadline for your project? Can you still change?

Most people will use memory cards of one particular type, most will have several of these, and most will probably have their own little wallet to carry them in.

So YES go for it, get rid of that surplus packaging that is only discarded as soon as the product is bought...and then keep going into other areas of unneccesary packaging. Good on ya.

As sdommin stated, the packaging for memory is merely a security concern. The way CD distributors were able to do away with the excessive packaging was by putting those magnetic strips in the jewel cases to set off alarms at the exits. I don't think there is really any way to use that same tech for our tiny digital memory cards (whether it is the "COOL" CF or any other type).

Perhaps a different twist on this would be to get people to be honest and not steal. That would also ease some of the threads on this site about copyrights.

MTalley wrote:
See if you can convince all of the manufacturers of any type of product to quit packaging items in tough plastic containers that require a knife or scissors to open and you'll be my hero for life.

Have you bought a knife or scissors lately? They come packaged like this too! If I had scissors to get into the packaging, I wouldn't be buying scissors!

I bought a wallet to hold all my extra cards. The first time I used it, I accidentaly misplaced it. That made me realize what a bad idea it was to keep all my cards in a small, easily lost container. My cards are all back in their individual conainers and I haven't used it since.

The last time I took a memory card to cvs, they put it in a small container attached to a key chain. It holds 4 cards- might hold 8. I put it on my regualar key ring- minus any cards- to see how it would hold up. It is doing ok. I wanted to make sure the latch would stay latched and my cards would not fall out.

I think it will be fine to take a card to and from a lab, but will probably not store them in there.

Personally, I would not want to have to carry something in to purchase a memory card. Several of them I have bought out of the blue- ie: oh no, I left the card in the laptop- I'll run in circuit city, etc.

pam