Netbook or more cards?

Since going from a 40d to a 7d I've found I'm beginning to lack a bit of shoot storage, at the moment I have 4 x 4gb cards (150 raw each) & an 8gb card.

So now part of me says buy a couple of 16gb transcends for about £110 or the other part says buy something like a samsung netbook at about £180 secondhand, but with 240gb of spare space to hold pics & just download the cards I have when I need to?

Both options have pros & cons, larger cards mean less swapping but I'll really need to try & sell the smaller cards to replace them with a third 16gb card giving me 1800 raw pics to full

The netbook will of course hold alot more, but vie got to keep downloading once my current cards are full & it also means if the hd fails I lose the lot cos will have reused the cards??

Choices choices

Shelton.

I use both.The Netbook only goes with me when I am out of town and have time at night to transfer images, assuming I even need to. I have quite a few cards. It's a great tool to review my images at the end of the day and, maybe, trash the crappy ones, or be able to show other people.

I don't think there is any substitute for having enough cards to comfortably do a day's shooting. You can also delete images off the cards when you have a few moments when you are not shooting to make more room.

If you need to watch your budget, don't buy the fastest cards out there unless you really need them.

I have the 7D and it is a card killer for space. But I got a netbook and a portable hard drive. You can get a 500 GB PHD for around $70 now. If you can upload your images daily, you only need 2 8GB cards and you'd get 500 images RAW + JPEG easily.

+1 on the netbook (250gb HD) with a transcend 500gb StoreJet external hard drive, found that was the cheapest at the time. Portability of netbook and 8hr battery life allows for download and pp on the run.

Thanks all, as I say I have enough in cards for 1200 shots which covers me for a day, so think with the comments above the netbook & cardreader are the way to go instead more cards

Shelton.

Are there any good netbooks with a built in CF card slot? That would be sweet. Upgrade the HDD in it to a 500GB or 640GB and you could dump all you want onto it from the CF cards. Though I must admit, I have never once filled up all the CF I carry with me. I have four 8GB and a 16GB and Ive never come close even with a thousand shots fired on a 5D and I only shoot RAW.

Nope. CF slots never made it into more than a handful of computers since they used the same interface as PC Cards, so a PC Card slot was "plenty" as far as the manufacturers were concerned. And with the plethora of devices using the (inferior) SD format cards nowadays, and more computers coming with what used to be separate devices (network adapters, modems, GPS, . . .) and alternate I/O methods (BlueTooth, USB 2.0) there's even less incentive for manufacturers to provide the PC Card or CF slot in their portables. So we're stuck using external USB CF readers.

ebay card readers work for me. They're dirt cheap but they are also one more thing to carry. Transfer speeds are pretty darn fast.

Why do you guys shoot jpeg + raw? if you are going to edit the pictures anyway, why not just import raw only and export them afterwords?

Because netbooks don't get along with DPP, and because sometimes it's easier to pull the JPEGs off the card for a non-photo friend.

Jon wrote in post #10697810
Because netbooks don't get along with DPP, and because sometimes it's easier to pull the JPEGs off the card for a non-photo friend.

DPP works fine on my netbook. The only issue I had was the native screen resolution (DPP wants something a bit larger). a quick click enabled the 'virtual' screen, and I was in business.

Well, if you don't mind the slow processing speed. With a few hundred shots, it's faster to shoot RAW+JPEG Small than to try to process the stuff. An Atom seems to take around 5 min. per frame.

Jon wrote in post #10697847
Well, if you don't mind the slow processing speed. With a few hundred shots, it's faster to shoot RAW+JPEG Small than to try to process the stuff. An Atom seems to take around 5 min. per frame.

well, thats true enough

I would get more compact flash cards.

Consider this scenario:

You are at the beach, shooting the stunning sunset. You have only have 2 compact flash cards, and your filling them up fast. The sky and clouds are changing constantly revealing an ever more beautiful sunset. Suddenly, you just shot your last frame on your compact flash cards, and both of them are full. You could of, should of downloaded the first filled up card while you kept shooting, but was caught up in the magnificent sunset.

Now you have to pull out your netbook, start it up, hook up the card reader, and download the photos. All this while missing the chance to shoot, loosing the precious daylight/golden hour.

I would buy more cards, because they are dirt cheep.

Will fastviewer work on a Netbook to be able to look at RAW shots through explorer?

I only ever shoot in RAW

Shelton.

The Fastone image viewer (freeware) works on the netbook and can view a range of raw formats, it's slow to render a RAW file but fast when using the embedded preview image.