Camera Memory Cards: Does Size Matter?

Life was so much simpler in the days when film cameras ruled. For one, new models didn’t keep hitting the shelves every few months. Technology didn’t get redundant at the pace it does today. Take memory cards, for instance. Not so long ago, a 1GB card was considered large enough for a professional photographer and we mere mortals were quite satisfied with a 256MB card. But today, the bare minimum anyone usually starts off with is 2GB. And the thirst for larger capacities seems insatiable, as memory card makers keep launching bigger and faster cards every few months. Very recently, a new standard for SD cards called SDXC was announced, which can support upto 2TB in a single card. Yes, you read it right, that's 2000GB. So, where does that leave us now? What’s the largest capacity card money can buy you today? And more importantly, does one really need a monster card in the camera, or will having two or three smaller capacity cards serve the purpose better? Read on for an objective analysis of the pros and cons of the ‘size race’.

(Click on any image to enlarge)

To come directly to the point, the largest capacity card you can buy today is 32GB. That’s astonishing considering not so long ago, 40GB was the standard size for a computer hard drive, and was enough for the OS plus all applications as well as data! And now you have 32GB camera cards. But simply having a large card is only half the deal.

The more important feature of a card is its write speed. The write speed is usually indicated either as MB per second (MBps), ‘X’ (as in 133X, where one ‘X’ corresponds to roughly 6.66 MBps), or as a ‘Class’ value – Class 2, Class 4, Class 6, where the number indicates the minimum guaranteed speed in MBps. Speed of the card is critical as the camera is ready for the next shot only when the data of the previous shot has been written on to the card. So, if you want to use the continuous mode of your SLR to fire off, say, at 4 frames per second, but your card being slow can’t keep up with the camera, you pretty much won’t be able to do it. Thus your camera underperforms because of the lower speed of your card, and you may end up missing that ‘Kodak moment’!

The card manufacturers know it and it reflects directly in their pricing. Consider this: a Sandisk 16 GB 45 MBps CF card (Extreme IV) costs $190, the Sandisk 16GB 30 MBps CF card (Extreme III) costs $93, and a Sandisk 32GB 30 MBps CF card retails for $185. That’s almost double the price difference for the same amount of memory from the same manufacturer for a higher speed card and a comparable price for almost double the memory but much slower speed.

The table below summarizes the size, speed, cost and cost per MB of some popular brands of CF and SD cards available today (kindly click to enlarge). This list is not exhaustive, but indicative. I’ve tried to incorporate most commonly used brands. All prices are from Amazon.com and are current till 21st May 2009.

There are two trends clearly visible from the above chart;

1. For the same memory, faster cards are much higher priced.

2. Smaller capacity cards have lower cost/MB ratio and give better value for money.

Please continue on to page 2, where you will learn the pros and cons of using a large and fast memory card, as opposed to several smaller sized memory cards.