A Memory Card Torture Test

An anonymous reader writes "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards? If you want to find out how much better a high speed memory card is, check out this group test of high capacity compact flash and SD cards."

Interesting.

[JPamplin]

You'd think cards developed to the same spec would have equal performance. Is that really not the case with SD or others? Interesting article.

20 pages of spam

[Anonymous Coward]

this is nothing more than spam, 20 pages of fluff (with 5+ adverts per page) in order to sell a few memory cards on a website called "trusted reviews", yeah right

no wonder digg is getting popular

Always performance, never durability

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everybody test performance, but nobody tests durability? What good is a ginormous flash card that stores your images in a fraction of a second when it trashes the FAT after some 10000 writes because the flash cells can't take anymore writes. There go the once in a lifetime shots.

Why people shop for price

[timeOday]

When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.

Simple answer

[Anonymous Coward]

"So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?"

Because if your camera can write 1MB/s, it doesn't matter if your memory card has theoretical write speed of 1MB/s, 2MB/s, 4MB/s or 10MB/s. You will get 1MB/s of write performance in any case.

It's interesting that they tested memory cards with Canon EOS 1D Mark II camera that costs $3500. I wonder how the results would look if they would've used $350 camera instead.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[MyLongNickName]

It's called octane. Has nothing to do with quality.

Re:But...

[Hal_Porter]

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.

It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in software.

http://www.levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html [levien.com]

The idea is that you can sell a generic performance product $x and a 'high end product for discerning consumers' at $2x. The high end product may actually have a lower performance for price one, but everyone wants to a be a 'discerning consumer', 'early adopter' and so on.

Is there really any difference between someone who willingly overspends by several hundred percent on ultra high end storage devices, so they can transfer the few pictures they take a year a second or so quicker and someone who does the same on sports shoes so they can pose in the mall?

Review sites ... anonymous posters ...

[tomstdenis]

Hey, how about this editors...

I'll pay for a slashdot account once you

1. Stop allowing "anonymous" people to post to ad ridden review sites

2. Stop posting stories about ad ridden review sites that split the story to 30 pages

3. Stop even thinking about talking about ad ridden review sites

4. Mirror the occasional real story so we can actually read it the same day the story is posted.

It's called "not selling out". If I give you money I want something of value in return. If I wanted a barrage of retarded stories I'd head to Fark. At least they don't pretend to be a "news" website.

Tom

Re:Review sites ... anonymous posters ...

[liuyunn]

at least the whole Ferrari analogy gave a whole lot of people something to talk about

It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Even at 5 frames per second my Canon EOS 20D SLR cannot write faster than my memory card can accept even though I'm using a plain "slow" CompactFlash. There is no reason to buy "high speed" cards unless you have a lot of extra money making your wallet heavy. And, just to clarify, yes I would put regular in a Ferrari. Unless you have a high-compression ratio in your motor, regular gas will perform *exactly* as well as premium. It always amazes me how much the marketplace relies on ignorance for profit.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

To add to your comments, some manufacturers state RMS on amplifiers without stating the amount of distortion they get out of it...

You could buy a high end amplifier that gives 50W RMS/stereo channel @ .007%thd... whereas you could buy a low-end 100W RMS/stereo channel @ 1%thd, and I would bet the 50W amplifier would sound "louder" or "better" on the same speakers, all other things being the same.

Of course, once you start buying low enough, it seems that Manufacturers can twist the #s to mean whatever they want....

Define "Expensive"

[edunbar93]

So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

Well, I suppose that all depends on how you define an expensive camera.

$300, while expensive, is not expensive for a camera. Kind of like how $3000 is not expensive for a car.

Expensive cameras generally start at around $900. That's around where professional SLR digital cameras *start*, and go up from there. And believe me, anyone who spends $2000+ on a camera, doesn't fuck around with buying cheap cards. That's in no small part because they need very *large* memory cards to store pictures in RAW format.

"Most of us" don't spend that much money on a camera. Most of us spend around $300-$500. And thus, since we generally don't have a lot of money left over to spend, it's spent on cheap memory cards. Not that it's a big deal these days, since today's cheap memory cards are last week's hella fast and large memory cards. I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30. And I'm told I could have gotten it at 1/3 that cost elsewhere. Our Canon A80 has a 1x write 256M CF card from 2 years ago, and it was considerably more expensive than that.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[DarkVader]

Haven't we gone over this enough?

High octane gas = better product if you have a high-compression engine.

Low octane gas = better product if you have a low-compression engine.

There is actually more energy per gallon in low octane gas, but in a higher compression engine, it can ignite from the compression, rather than from the spark. This is a problem.

If you put the expensive stuff in a low-compression engine, you will get lower fuel mileage and cause excessive carbon buildup - which will cost you a lot more money, and shorten the life of your engine.

Your car MAY need high octane gas - but DO NOT assume this. It may instead need low octane gas.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[fm6]

That's a good, simple, clear, and concise explanation. But it leaves a couple of important questions unanswered. How is a fancy camera like a high-performance car? And how is brand-name memory like high-octane gas? Comparing a digital camera to a Ferrari is bullshit.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Bastian]

I mean for me to drive home to my folks place is equivalent to [roughly] driving entirely from one end of England to the other. And I don't even leave the province I'm in to do my trip!!! Talk to me when you live in a country that is 3000Km wide about the price of gas.

You seem to be operating under the belief that burning a lot of gas entitles you to cheaper gas. It doesn't. Gasoline is a commodity, not a right. It'd be wise to come to grips with that fact ASAP, because North American gas prices are going to continue to rise out of their artificially low state, and will probably continue to rise as oil becomes more scarce. If you want to talk to anybody about the price of gas, I'd suggest starting with the mindless machinations of the world economy.

Re:But...

[Hal_Porter]

Not if they use wear levelling they don't. Each 512 byte sector can be anywhere on the physical media, and there's a clever translation mechanism [slashdot.org] to keep track of this. So the FAT filesystem may write sector 1 very frequently, sector 1 moves all over the physical media.

So rather than 10000 pictures, you should get 10000*(Media_Size) / (Picture_Size)

Which gives some fairly non intuitive lifetimes [slashdot.org]