Which one should I buy?

Many people are wondering which type of memory card to buy. Questions like: how big should the card be, which brand is the best, does the speed rating matter… wonder through the minds of many people right now. This article will try to shed some light on these aspects. When it comes to a digital camera, you can replace a broken lens but you can never replace the lost photos on a damaged memory card.

The Reliability of the memory card

One of the first things you should do is take a look at the memory card. Most camera use Secure Digital (SD) memory cards and the professional ones use Compact Flash Cards (CF). CFs tend to cost more money and they have higher writing speeds, a bigger storage capacity and they are less exposed to failure. This article will talk about these two card types.

The best memory card manufacturers are SanDisk and Lexar.

SanDisk came with the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) with a guaranty of more than 1,000,000 hours before the card fails. This type of card is also rated for about 10,000 insertions. Also, the card has an error management system that can rewrite data from a defective sector to a good one on the fly. SanDisks has the Error Detection Code and Error Correction Code that recovers corrupted data automatically. The regular SanDisk CF card is able to withstand a shock of 2,000G. But you should be aware of the fact that there are many fake SanDisk cards on the market and you should also get a validity certificate.

Right now there are many conflicting opinions about the writing speeds and people tend to prefer the smaller cards. The argument is that if the card fails, is damaged or lost, you will not have a lot of pictures stored there if the card is small.