Fill your boots - CF prices

So a recent upgrade from my 20D to a 40D has made me feel the pinch on my pair of 4GB cards, I have enough for a day trip, but not really enough for a good week away, where I could just get by on my 20D. Yes I have one of those portable HDs but quite frankly I don't trust it and its slow.

So off to the web I go, only to find out that the $120NZ I spent on my last 4GB card will now get me 16GB, heck for a little over that I can get 32GB!

Terms like 'eggs in one basket' quickly come to mind with cards like that, but I could go away on a holiday and never need to remove the card from the camera

I may continue by expanding my 4GB collection, but for bang for buck, you can't seem to beat those 16GB cards.

Probably a good time to talk performance too, yes I am aware these are not the fastest cards on the block, but thus far I have not filled the buffer on my 40D so card speed has never been an issue.

Doesn't seem that long ago I was splashing out for 32MB cards and 128MB seemed like madness

I would much rather rotate and use several 2 gb or maybe 4 gb cards than a 16 or 32. thats alot of pics to stack up in one shoot or week of shooting. i would rather dump my cards 5 times a day. seems to run alot of risk or chance to loose alot of photos should something happen to your card with that many pics on it, ten it was all for nothing. save the money and get you a new portable HD maybe?

mike_k_23 wrote in post #5240264
I would much rather rotate and use several 2 gb or maybe 4 gb cards than a 16 or 32. thats alot of pics to stack up in one shoot or week of shooting. i would rather dump my cards 5 times a day. seems to run alot of risk or chance to loose alot of photos should something happen to your card with that many pics on it, ten it was all for nothing. save the money and get you a new portable HD maybe?

I always shoot RAW now which does not help my cause, lasted a week over Christmas with my 40D and the pair of 4GBs but only just. Found myself clearing out the duds at the end of each day to ensure I had enough space, probable a good discapline to have but still a pain.

As for those HDs, onto my second one now, an XS Drive, its a pain, needs a lot of work on the UI and it takes about an hour to copy and verify a 4GB card, then my photos are on spinning bits which I don't trust in the field as much as solid state flash.

I am leaning towards a couple more 4G's at the moment, I would love to have a portable CF copier that would copy from one card to another as a backup though

I am finding the 8 gig cards to be perfect for my use. I have a bunch of 4's that I use as back ups and hardly ever use the 2's I carry.

And for brands, I have never had a Sandisk fail. Not so with Lexar, although, I have always been able to recover the images with software. But Sandisk is my brand now.

Just get two more 4's.

mike_k_23 wrote in post #5240264
I would much rather rotate and use several 2 gb or maybe 4 gb cards than a 16 or 32. thats alot of pics to stack up in one shoot or week of shooting. i would rather dump my cards 5 times a day. seems to run alot of risk or chance to loose alot of photos should something happen to your card with that many pics on it, ten it was all for nothing. save the money and get you a new portable HD maybe?

Try shooting sports. It doesn't take long to fill up a card and you often can't pause to switch cards or to dump them. one 4GB card rarely gets me through a soccer match.

J.

JohnJ80 wrote in post #5242384
Try shooting sports. It doesn't take long to fill up a card and you often can't pause to switch cards or to dump them. one 4GB card rarely gets me through a soccer match.

J.

John,

i have shot plenty of sports. granted we had a computer set up in a booth and the kids running cards back and forth, but shooting arena cross motorcycle races and piling up 8000-10000 photos is tiring trust me. what if something were to happen to a card though? and you lost all those images from the event? that is the only point i was making. it takes maybe 20 seconds to switch cards and format.

it is a matter of personal preference i suppose and i can see plusses and minuses both ways.

That's too many eggs in one basket if you ask me. I'd rather hassle around with several cards and know that if one goes bad, at least I have the rest of the pics saved.

mike_k_23 wrote in post #5245737
John,

i have shot plenty of sports. granted we had a computer set up in a booth and the kids running cards back and forth, but shooting arena cross motorcycle races and piling up 8000-10000 photos is tiring trust me. what if something were to happen to a card though? and you lost all those images from the event? that is the only point i was making. it takes maybe 20 seconds to switch cards and format.

it is a matter of personal preference i suppose and i can see plusses and minuses both ways.

I suppose it you have a support set up like and runners to get cards back to the computer then it makes more sense to have smaller cards. I'm a one man band when I'm shooting so.... different problem I guess.

I'm not worried about card reliability.

J.

JohnJ80 wrote in post #5246700
I suppose it you have a support set up like and runners to get cards back to the computer then it makes more sense to have smaller cards. I'm a one man band when I'm shooting so.... different problem I guess.

I'm not worried about card reliability.

J.

me neither....and if i was i would be more worried if i used multiple cards .

ed rader

Ah the eggs in one basket argument.

I am undecided about it but do fell uncomfortable with a single card though with everything on it.

Anyway some though, I will use some made up numbers for this exercise but it should still work as a hypothetical statistical situation.

Lets say that the chance of a CF failure is 1 in 1000 uses, so if I decide to play the eggs in one basket game with a 16GB card, on average every 1000 uses I will loose all my photos.

But if I have 8 2GB cards then then I will loose 2GB of photos every 125 uses.

More cards = more chances for failure or card loss/theft

vs

Less cards = potential for larger losses

In the end it should even out if I take (and loose) enough shots.

I have never had a technical failure but have lost two cards with photos to thefts, one with the camera one without, both times I lost images.

Perhaps the safest solution is to have enough card capacity for a given trip of assignment but copy them all to a portable drive as a backup? In this scenario more smaller cards are probably better.

I really think theft and card loss is the main enemy of images in my experience.

FlyingPete wrote in post #5247112
Ah the eggs in one basket argument.

I am undecided about it but do fell uncomfortable with a single card though with everything on it.

Anyway some though, I will use some made up numbers for this exercise but it should still work as a hypothetical statistical situation.

Lets say that the chance of a CF failure is 1 in 1000 uses, so if I decide to play the eggs in one basket game with a 16GB card, on average every 1000 uses I will loose all my photos.

But if I have 8 2GB cards then then I will loose 2GB of photos every 125 uses.

More cards = more chances for failure or card loss/theft

Your math doesn't quite add up. It only makes sense if you use all four cards at once and for the same images. But you don't. Your camera only uses 1 card at a time. You still have the 1 in 1000 chance of failure on any given card, but only losing part of your image set rather than them all.

cdifoto wrote in post #5247146
Your math doesn't quite add up. It only makes sense if you use all four cards at once and for the same images. But you don't. Your camera only uses 1 card at a time. You still have the 1 in 1000 chance of failure on any given card, but only losing part of your image set rather than them all.

Sorry clarification, I assumed I shot to a full 16GB capacity so every time, so I had one full 16GB card or 8 full 2GB cards.

Yes an unrealistic situation.

More of a think about a single big card the less I like it. There is a real danger to become lazy and not regularly download, and the potential is greater to loose shots then due to the camera being nicked with the card in it. There are times I could not download for over a month with a 16GB on board!

Big is relative though. I buy cards based on how many images I can fit on it, not it's actual capacity. If I'm comfortable with about 280 RAW images on a card, that means 2GB for the 10D and 3GB (actually 4 which is more images but 3GB cards aren't in existence or easy to come by) for the 1D II.

FlyingPete wrote in post #5247112
Ah the eggs in one basket argument.

I am undecided about it but do fell uncomfortable with a single card though with everything on it.

Anyway some though, I will use some made up numbers for this exercise but it should still work as a hypothetical statistical situation.

Lets say that the chance of a CF failure is 1 in 1000 uses, so if I decide to play the eggs in one basket game with a 16GB card, on average every 1000 uses I will loose all my photos.

But if I have 8 2GB cards then then I will loose 2GB of photos every 125 uses.

More cards = more chances for failure or card loss/theft

vs

Less cards = potential for larger losses

In the end it should even out if I take (and loose) enough shots.

I have never had a technical failure but have lost two cards with photos to thefts, one with the camera one without, both times I lost images.

Perhaps the safest solution is to have enough card capacity for a given trip of assignment but copy them all to a portable drive as a backup? In this scenario more smaller cards are probably better.

I really think theft and card loss is the main enemy of images in my experience.

The MTBF (Mean time between failures) of CF cards and the underlying IC's is very long. If you have two cards, the MTBF of the two cards together is half of the single card.

The main issue with "card failure" is really user error - losing the card or removing the card physically while the camera is writing data. I can deal with the user error and have never had a problem with it in years of using this stuff. I've never lost a card and I've never removed a card without turning off the camera.

In the chain of cards, psds, computers etc... far and away the highest reliability item is the CF card - probably by multiple orders of magnitude.

J.