puckhead193 said:
I want another card for when i got to China. Since I have an 8 MP camera i and something big so i was thinking of 1GB cause i have a 1 GB card already.
You're thinking of taking
only 2GB total?
FWIW, had you been shooting film, how many rolls would you have planned to take on this trip? (10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - more?)
Also i notice them have speeds. The more speed the faster it write to the card? I think i currently have a lexar professional 80x 1 GB card. Will this do.
The I/O speed of Flash Media has two places where it bottlenecks.
The first is when you take the picture...this can factor into how many shots in a row (quick succession) your system may be able to take. How often you need to take a burst depends a lot on your subjects ... ie, wildlife action needs it, but landscapes don't
The second bottleneck is when you're downloading the card onto your computer - - with slow cards, it can be a looooooooong wait (10+ minutes) while you're sitting there impatiently waiting for the results.
My personal rule of thumb is to definitely not get "standard" speed. While the Extreme, 80x or newer still 120x cards are obviously better, I'd get at least an "Ultra II" speed rating or equivalent (40x). You can find this speed sold today at under $50 per 1GB.
How should I shoot? ... i'm gonna shoot at the highest resolution bit i can chance image quality?
it gives me:
Raw...
RAW will give you the maximum image potential. The problem is that it eats up storage like mad. IIRC, on my 20D (also 8MP), when I save each shot as RAW+JPG, it eats up around 13MB per image, which means that I only get around 75 photo's per 1GB card - - - that's the equivalent of 2 rolls of 35mm film!
With 2GB in CF cards, I'd expect that you'll be carrying only enough for 150 shots before you need to download your cards. How many photos you'll shoot in China is up to you, as well as what you plan to do when your cards get filled.
YMMV, but with film, I've been able to shoot over 300 images/day when on vacation (Alaska). Translating that into a GB equivalent with an 8MP RAW consumption rate, it means I would have used 4GB
per day.
What all this means is that depending on how much you expect to shoot, how long your trip is and if you're planning on carrying a laptop with you, you might want to consider some storage alternatives, such as a pair of
Hyperdrive HD80's.
This is one of the downsides that I've seen to digital - -
how are you going to manage what do you do when you're "away from home" (the computer you're going to download to) for an extended period of time?
Because CF cards are reusuable, it is easy to get by with just 1 or 2 of them when kicking around at home. But the problem is when you don't have the home desktop, Digital Wallet, Laptop (or time out of your vacation to go search out a store who will burn them to CD for you, etc) to get the data off your cards so that you can reuse them: this determines how many GB you need to get through the demand, and it just becomes one more thing you have to plan for.
FWIW, I'm getting organized for my first trip to Africa, and I'll be taking an 8MP 20D and shoot in RAW+JPEG. I figure that to be reasonably safe, I'll want to have 4-6GB worth of cards for it in order to be able to get through each day, maybe more, and due to weight restrictions, I'll be carrying a pair of HD80's (for redundency) instead of a laptop. If there's an opportunity to burn to CD's en route, I'll do that too, so as to have another backup copy. The cost of buying two HD80's and a couple more GB of cards is cheap compared to the rest of the trip, so its worth doing.
-hh
