Camera Card??

[sjlogghe]

I'm looking to buy a second camera card for my D5000, as a "just in case" my current one fills up while I'm on vacation next week. When I purchased my camera, the lady had me buy the really expensive SD card with the fast download time, etc.

If I'm just using it as a backup card, is a higher end expensive one really that important? Or do you think I'd be okay getting the less expensive ones from Walmart or Target? (They have an 8GB card for around $30, I think). What's the difference between the more/less expensive camera cards - is there a difference in quality, or just download time?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[marmots]

well certain cards can have critical data errors, or sometimes just completely shut down/ fall apart

 

[MrBarney]

It's always good to have a spare or two anyway.

In short, no you don't "need" a fast card. Primarily it will affect how many shots you can capture in burst mode before the buffer is full and it slows down, as well as some other minor points. Remember to watch the light that tells you the camera is still writing to the card before you switch off the camera though!

What I *would* recommend is that you choose a good quality brand of card just for peace of mind, such as SanDisk, Kingston, Lexar, PNY etc.

If you know how large a typical photo is for your camera (probably about 15MB RAW, or 5MB JPEG), then this might help work out the difference: Secure Digital - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[crimbfighter]

I did a lot of research on this before purchasing my second SDHC card. What I got from all the professionals, is you don't want to go less than a class 6 SDHC card for a dslr. Below class 6 you will inevitably run in to a situation where you are waiting for the camera to chug along and you really want to be snapping that next shot.

MrBarney was right, in that it affects how fast the data can be written to the card. The higher the class, the higher the amounts of data that can be written to the card in a given time frame, usually measured in Mbps. My class 10 should be able to transfer up to about 15-16 Mbps at peak performance. That's fast enough to keep shooting jpegs indefinitely w/o interruption. In RAW+jpeg, about 15 shots before the camera has to slow down to catch up the buffer. Regardless, more than I should ever need...

My rule of thumb is every memory card I buy, I want it to perform just as well as the first, because you never know when your "secondary" card will suddenly become your "primary" card because one got corrupted, lost, full, ect. In the long run, memory is cheap. I got my last class 10 8g for $40 off Newegg.com and it hasn't faulted yet.

As for your question about quality, ABSOLUTELY it does! My advice is to look on line, Newegg is one of my fave's, and take the time to read reviews on the different cards. Most of the reviews are very honest, and written by folks much more tech salvey than I, and many go into depth on why the cheaper ones are bad. Cheap SD cards will have a higher likely hood of corrupting, and once that happens, you've lost everything on it...

Anyway, just my insignificant opinion, hope it helps