After using mostly 2GB cards for a couple of years now, I'm getting tired of carrying so many cards. Always kept thinking about failures...but I've never had one yet with these cards. They just keep on ticking.
I'm dropping some money on 8 and 16 GB cards, with some reservation about my eggs.
Sounds like a great idea! I'll add that I *did* have one complete, irrepairable failure with a 2GB card while I was in Haiti. Not a huge deal, but we did lose a lot of great photos that day. So I am having a hard time moving above a 4GB card
I'm shooting with 8Gb and 16Gb cards. However, in order to avoid loosing all my images in case of failure, I don't fill them up. I see 8Gb and 16Gb cards just like a 4Gb card but with added "overhead" which I may need in particular situation where changing a card would mean potentially losing images.
I get paronid about putting all my images on one card. I have an 8 , but prefer ot use the 2's and 4's. It only takes a few seconds to change a card. Thomas
Is there anyway to test the condition of the cards, so as to predict when they might be starting to fail or deterioate? or do they just go *bang* and they are dead?
They just go *bang*, though frequently it's from a physical bang, whether being dropped or by being shorted somehow. I keep 16GB SD's in my 1DS/1D, works great in a pinch. My CFs are 4 and 8.
Comparing one 16G card and two 8G or four 4G cards, the card failure rate is much much less than the rates you lost your cards or physically damage the cards....
And you do have the very high rate to recover your failed card if it happened. But if your cards were lost or physically damaged, you have very few chance to get the data back...
I have not yet tried the larger capacity cards, but I tend to agree with lidesun- that the human error rate is most likely much higher than mechanical errors.
lidesun wrote:
Comparing one 16G card and two 8G or four 4G cards, the card failure rate is much much less than the rates you lost your cards or physically damage the cards....
And you do have the very high rate to recover your failed card if it happened. But if your cards were lost or physically damaged, you have very few chance to get the data back...
I had just come home from shooting a senior session and took my card out. I set it down on the island in our kitchen. I made the mistake of setting it on the placemat.
My wife had a pan full of water in one side of the sink.
She picked up the placemat to shake it off and the card went into the pan of water.
I didnt see it happen and didnt even miss the card for about 5 minutes. I went to pick it up and go dl the pics and couldnt find it. We looked all over for it. Finally found it in the bottom of the pan. So at this point it was probably under water for at least 8-10 minutes.
I almost killed her. So my thoughts were this. I could wait and see if it would dry out...but I was also worried about water eventually seeping into the card. Or I could try to grab the images right away and hope i didnt fry the card or my comp.
I took a hair dryer to it for about 2 minutes and loaded into my card reader.
Guess what, not a lick of trouble or corrupted image.
In fact I still use this card today. i have recently bought some 4gb ultra2 cards from costco...couldnt pass them up at 28 dollars.
All my cards are sandisk ultra 2.
I have a 1 GB card that I gave a ride in the washingmashine. During this it got a dent in the pin end. Thought it was dead, so in my workbench I pressed the dent back in position, so it was possible to put the card back in the camera. And it worked. I still use it.
Once I got corrupted images, where only 10 to 50 percent of each picture was ok. I think it was my cardreader that made the problem, so I changed it and have had no problems since.
Yesterday my Epson 2000 said, that the 2 GB Lexar card was corrupted, but I could see all the pictures on my 5D.The rest of the day (1000 pics) the doubt was there.
So I am looking foreward to get a 1Ds3(or2) so that I can store my pics on two cards and then I will have no problems going for a 8 GB card, but until then I will stick with my 2 GB card.
fchang wrote:
I know some of Canon's won't take more than 8gig CF & I think 5D is one, my 30D is another.
The latest firmware update for the 5D now allows the use of higher capacity CF cards.
The higher the demand of memory from the camera, the more you need a higher capacity card---this is especially true when shooting with a medium format digital. I won't buy anything less than 8GB now, and 16GB just doesn't seem to be so huge anymore......
