I am looking to buy a memory upgrade for my digital camera (It’s an Olympus – uses “smartmedia”), and I’m thinking that I want a 64mb card.
I can get the brand name (Olympus) memory card, or I can spend about 1/2 as much and get a no-name equivalent. Has anyone bought these off-brands? Any pros or cons you care to share?
Thanks in advance.
Go for the no-name equivalent. All you lose is the panorama capability on the card.
I’ve seen prices as low as about $30.00 for the 64MB cards.
I have an Olympus 64 meg card and a off-brand (PNY) 32 meg card. The PNY gives me lots of problems, the Olympus works perfectly.
It’s a sample size of one, so take it with a grain of salt.
Finagle, I have an Olympus 16mb card – do I have that panorama capability now? Have you used it? Any thoughts?
Telemark, what kinds of problems?
I have an Olympus D-460. For my trip to Spain last fall I bought two SanDisk 16MB SmartMedia cards, at about 40% less than the Olympus price. They’ve worked like a charm, and I plan to buy a much bigger card now.
The panorama mode lets you take several pictures to create a panorama. On my camera (D-490) you use the menu like you were going into movie mode but chose the other option. A little frame shows up on the view screen with alignment bars, and you make sure that the end of one shot overlaps the begining of then next.
When you load the pictures into your computer, a special icon shows up under the Camedia software. If you’ve loaded the stitching software you can then “stitch” the photos together to form a panorama. It works OK, but I bought the Panavue software which does a better job and is much more flexible. But the software that comes with the camera isn’t that bad.
The problems with the PNY card is that images get corrupted when I try to load them on the computer. On a full card (roughly 60 images) about 3 or 4 will not download due to file corruption. I’ve reformatted the card but no real change.
I have the same camera Telemark does, and never missed the panoramic capabilities (never used it anyway). I have a 64 mb Viking card, and it works w/out a hitch. It supposedly has a slower refresh rate than the Olympus card, though if this is true, it’s either a negligible difference, or I need to take pictures more quickly.
For the class of digital cameras we all are using, the difference in refresh rates (card speeds) are completely down in the noise level. All SmartMedia cards should work about the same in these cameras, except for the Olympus pano feature.
My bum 32 meg card is probably just an anomoly.