Best place for compact flash cards.

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PauloWanClift

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I feel the need for some serious capacity, or maybe several smaller cards, undecided. I've no idea where to get the best prices though.
 
Beware of eBay, too many fakes on there. I recently checked out prices for an 8gb Extreme IV (Sandisk) and found Amazon the cheapest and I know its a genuine product.
Trev
 
Definitely amazon! And I'd suggest lots of little cards, if you have all your images on a 16gb card or similar and the card fails, it's all gone! Avoid putting your eggs in 1 basket and all that!

Chris
 
You can try 7dayshop . And having 2 8gb cards is better than 1 16gb card. Cheaper as well.
 
chris321 said:
Definitely amazon! And I'd suggest lots of little cards, if you have all your images on a 16gb card or similar and the card fails, it's all gone! Avoid putting your eggs in 1 basket and all that!

Chris
Click to expand...

I'd recommend buying one big card. If you put your eggs in lots of baskets then it's much more likely that one of those baskets will get dropped.

CF cards are extremely reliable. I've been using them since 16MB was considered large and I've only ever had two fail (and one was my fault for puling it out of a PDA while it was being writ to). With the other one that failed I managed to recover most of the data.

It's much more likely that a card will suffer either mechanical damage while getting plugged into a socket (which you'll do more often with small cards) or get lost.

I've lost as may cards as I've had fail. When you're in a hurry and the 'card full' message comes up then it's easy to put the full card down and forget about it - or for it to drop, un-noticed, from the pocket you've put it in. With my single 16GB card the only way I can lose the card is to lose the camera.

Also, unless you're anally strict about organising them, there's always the possibility of accidentally over-writing one of the full cards.

Then there's the fact that having multiple cards increases the risk of one of them failing. Suppose the failure rate of cards is 5%. If you shoot 16GB onto a single card then you've a 95% chance of keeping all your shots. But, if you shoot 8x2GB cards then the chances are one in three that you'll lose at least one card. If you shoot 16x1GB then it's odds-on that one will fail.

So shooting multiple small cards means replacing the, vanishingly small, chance that you'll lose all your images with the, proportionately, much larger chance that you'll lose some images.
 
It is far safer saving to smaller cards in my and almost everyone else's opinion, I put my empty cards in one ZIP UP pocket in my bag and full cards in another. You don't have to be that organised to do something that simple.

the chances are one in three that you'll lose at least one card
Click to expand...

I have still not lost a card.

So shooting multiple small cards means replacing the, vanishingly small, chance that you'll lose all your images with the, proportionately, much larger chance that you'll lose some images.
Click to expand...

42 I think
 
I think you should buy 1gb cards or even 512 mb cards in case one fails to minimise the amount of images you lose. At least you will have all the other cards :LOL: [/sarcasm]

I use an 8gb card, it hardly ever leaves the camera. I normally buy the biggest I can afford.
 
CSB said:
I think you should buy 1gb cards or even 512 mb cards in case one fails to minimise the amount of images you lose. At least you will have all the other cards :LOL: [/sarcasm].
Click to expand...

Nah, use 16 MB cards. Then you can only use one image at a time. :LOL:
 
I have heard of this thing called "film". It comes in rolls of 36 shots, and goes in a much cheaper camera. Because it is chemical based, you send it off to get back some images on rectangles of compressed vegetable matter. Wierd new concept Huh! But because nothing is stored digitally, it will never fail. You can still lose them, but you only lose 36 pictures at a time. Now you do have to keep them in the fridge before you use them, and keep them in the dark when "full", but I can see the advantages.....
 
lawrie29 said:
I have heard of this thing called "film". It comes in rolls of 36 shots
Click to expand...

Wow, so it's like a strip of 36 memory cards? That sounds amazing, can you get it in SD format? :nuts:

Well each to their own, I'm going to stick to 2gb and 4gb cards, cheaper, and if I lose/break a card/camera, I'll lose less!
 
Big Dog said:
Yep, just ordered some myself as this is getting on for half price.
Click to expand...

Just ordered one for my wife's Dad (Extreme III - 4GB)

He's getting my A200 free of charge (aren't I nice?) and Mrs. deSad is buying him the card as part of his birthday present :)
 
hollis_f said:
I'd recommend buying one big card. If you put your eggs in lots of baskets then it's much more likely that one of those baskets will get dropped.

CF cards are extremely reliable. I've been using them since 16MB was considered large and I've only ever had two fail (and one was my fault for puling it out of a PDA while it was being writ to). With the other one that failed I managed to recover most of the data.

It's much more likely that a card will suffer either mechanical damage while getting plugged into a socket (which you'll do more often with small cards) or get lost.

I've lost as may cards as I've had fail. When you're in a hurry and the 'card full' message comes up then it's easy to put the full card down and forget about it - or for it to drop, un-noticed, from the pocket you've put it in. With my single 16GB card the only way I can lose the card is to lose the camera.

Also, unless you're anally strict about organising them, there's always the possibility of accidentally over-writing one of the full cards.

Then there's the fact that having multiple cards increases the risk of one of them failing. Suppose the failure rate of cards is 5%. If you shoot 16GB onto a single card then you've a 95% chance of keeping all your shots. But, if you shoot 8x2GB cards then the chances are one in three that you'll lose at least one card. If you shoot 16x1GB then it's odds-on that one will fail.

So shooting multiple small cards means replacing the, vanishingly small, chance that you'll lose all your images with the, proportionately, much larger chance that you'll lose some images.
Click to expand...


Hmmm, now that's food for thought and make no mistake!

There's logic in there somewhere, and I was almost sold on the idea. But I still think I'll stick with the 4gig cards I use for now.

You see, I've never had a card completely fail, but I have come to the end of a shoot and found that one of the cards I'd used had a load of corrupted data on it; all the images had a big wide orange band right down the middle of them. There was no sign of this on the camera during the shooting. I had used 4 and a bit 4gig cards (I was shooting water skiing from a boat) and lost 25% (ish) of the shots. It I'd been working with one big card, I'd have lost the lot.

But.....

and this is one of the factors in favour of the bigger card. I once damaged the card reader on my camera when I was fitting a CF card with a damaged socket which cost me over £100 for a new reader in the camera.

so....

It's a close call for me, big v. small? Small is still winning, but only on points and it's a very close fight.
 
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