Card sizes

[snappysi]

Hi All,
Was just flicking through "digital pro" magazine that i picked up yesterday and noticed an "advert" for a new Lexar sd card coming out with 256 GB of storage, with a 400x write speed.... Holy crap batman....In case your thinking " hey , just what i need" it comes in at a RRP of.. wait for it.... $899 !!!!!!!!!! It is apparently the first card of its kind with this much storage.
With the new generation of cameras coming out ( D800 ) with huge tiff files... it makes you wonder where this will end... or maybe what the next "discovery" will be in terms of storage for our devices.
One things for sure, i would never use a card that big for an important project and have the chance to lose that much data....I've never had a card fail, but it does happen. I guess it is moreso aimed at the video guys rather than sill image capture, that would be a LOT of pics.
Interested to hear others thoughts on this, where is card tech heading, would you use a card of this size etc

Simon.

[bladesp2]

I have had a card fail (top brand)so to spend so much and risk so many photos doesnt make sense to me .Thats my opinion anyway

[jim]

According to Thom Hogan, a smaller card of the same specification should perform a little better (ie be a bit faster) than a larger card. He doesn't recommend going over 16GB. Personally I doubt you'd ever need to. Admittedly you can get massive Tiff files off a D800, but that rather prompts the question: what on earth are you doing shooting Tiffs? And even on the D800 16GB is a pretty respectable lot of losslessly compressed NEFs.

And as you rightly note, a card failure that loses 256GB of your photographs is a card failure best avoided.

[arthurking83]

...... And even on the D800 16GB is a pretty respectable lot of losslessly compressed NEFs. .....

Not on a D800, unless you think 200 NEF's are enough for a day's shooting.

The officially supported largest card size is 128G on the D800 anyhow.

I got two 32G cards for mine(one SD and one CF), and each hold 400 images.
I have a pile of 8G cards for those times just in case I'm out for longer than I thought. 400 shots is about the battery life with minimal use of the Liveview feature, so I don't usually expect to shoot more than this.

FWIW: those latest and greatest cards at (currently) close to $1000!!! .. will be available for about $200 or so in a years time!

I can understand the need for them tho for those professional applications where minimising paraphernalia is a consideration too.

Even for video, 256 gigs is a bit extreme, unless the camera itself is capable of formatting the card in a file system such as ext or NTFS or something.
Most are not(yet) but apparently some are .
Most cameras only do fat32, or something lowly like that, which are all limited to 4gig files .. so at 256Gig, you would find yourself with 64 video files of a maximum of 4gig each.
Makes for a very tedious process of sorting, filing, editing .. etc.

[jim]

Not on a D800, unless you think 200 NEF's are enough for a day's shooting.

It actually is once I take a time-out and chuck all the rubbish

Plus I've got a 16GB SD card for overflow, and an old 8GB CF card in my pocket. And there's no way I'm going to fill all that up by the end of the day. Other peoples experience will vary of course.

[I @ M]

It actually is once I take a time-out and chuck all the rubbish

Plus I've got a 16GB SD card for overflow, and an old 8GB CF card in my pocket. And there's no way I'm going to fill all that up by the end of the day. Other peoples experience will vary of course.

I'm in your boat Jim, one 16gb CF and one 16gb SD card seems to handle the day photographing quite well. That gives 400 uncompressed NEF images.
More than that in one day starts to become holiday snapshot mode and the D700 or D200 handle those tasks well.

Of course as you rightly say there are those whose needs will differ, like wedding photographers determined to machine gun "the" shot of the day and landscape photographers that love to bracket 5 images at a time.

[snappysi]

Agreed here as well, i'm flat out filling 16gb.....cant imagine why on earth you would need 256......As Jim said, everyones experiences will be different, but wow, that is a LOT of card space.

Simon.

[ricktas]

I use two 64GB cards in my D800. Allows me around 800 RAW photos with backup to second card.

I think the size issue is nothing new, who went WOW when 4GB USB sticks came out, and who now has some that are 16GB or 32GB? We all tend to eventually find a need for more memory. Even computers come with 24GB and more of RAM now, yet in the past we operated PC's with 256MB of RAM.

You can buy 512GB SSD drives now, cheaper than 128GB SSD's were about 2 years ago.

This 256GB card is just the next progression. Some will buy it now, some will buy it in 2-3 years when it is about $300.00, and the 1024GB card has been released. Each to their own.

[swifty]

I'm a lightweight in terms of card use. 1X16GB SD for a video project I did once.
1X8GB SD and 3X8GB CFs for my 2 still cameras.
Heck, my laptop's only got 128GB. But I have several HDD I dump my data on once I'm done editing so I don't find that limiting.
I buy SD/CF cards at their sweet spot from a capacity/performance/market price point so maybe one day down the track I will be buying 256GB cards when terabyte cards become the new kids on the block.

[Xenedis]

Lexar cards are quite expensive anyway, as they are generally marketed towards professionals.

256GB cards are also larger than normal in terms of storage.

I think you'll find hi-cap SanDisk cards to also be expensive, especially if they feature much faster data transfer speeds.

Personally, I run two 16GB cards and have two 8GB cards and a 4GB card as spares.

On a single shoot I never fill a card anyway, and when travelling overseas I have my laptop, and also bring an external HDD so that I have three copies of all of my data.

What type of card to use (in terms of capacity) comes down to what you shoot, how much you shoot, and how often you have access to a computer to offload the card's data.

Conventional wisdom dictates that it's best not to put all of one's eggs in the one basket.

I've never had a card fail either, and for years I used the same card in my cameras; but failure can happen, and IMO it's best not to trust one large card for all of your images unless you can offload images reasonably quickly.

[arthurking83]

Cards can 'fail' even without use!

I had this issue a week or so ago, with another Sandisk card. An old 2Gb card in my old D70s. Went to do a clean on it and the camera captured the images of the plain blue sky, but the files on the card were all corrupted, messed up or blank.
Did it all again after deleting the non image files and again the same thing.
Formatted card about 10 times, with error checking and so forth, and eventually it came good again, but I have marked this card now as suspect.

I've lost one 2Gig CF card through failure a few years back .. so always be a bit watchful of your cards.