Was thinking of picking up a 1Gb card for the ol’ digital camera (rather, as a gift for someone else). I noticed that two stores are having sales for a Viking and a Lexar card. The cards are the same price.
I know Lexar’s been around for quite some time, but I’ve also heard that the Viking cards are of a superior quality.
Is there a discernible difference between the two brands? I figured that this was one of those things where they’re all made by the same factory and just have different labels on them. Going by online reviews, each will fail in the first ten minutes, set fire to the camera and send a warning beacon to the unmanned Predator drones which will then destroy my house.
Needless to say, I don’t put any stock in online reviews.
Another question: I was going to pick this up for someone who was going on vacation for a couple of weeks. I figure that the camera will hold about 1500 photos with the card, but are there any battery issues I should warn them about with a card so large?
Whichever type of card you use, check the read/write speed (and that of the camera as well). All these big-ass 7-megapixel cameras with their multi-megabyte filesizes can lead to a significant delay to store images between shots if you have a slow card write…
I can’t help you with CF, but I have a Viking SD card, which I am just ever so slightly less than comfortable with.
I bought a KingMax 256MB SD card a while back, and it’s great; slim, rigid and with a ‘solid’ feel to it. I bought a Viking 256MB SD card a while later and it is noticeably thicker (partly because it accommodates a tiny write-protect switch, I think) and has a flimsy, ‘hollow’ feeling to it. I’ll do a performance test on both devices and post the results in a moment…
Clearly they are not all the same; write speed isn’t necessarily crucial for digital photography though, as it may be that the camera limits the frequency of shots to something that doesn’t tax the cards anyway, but I use my cards for audio recording, which needs to work all the time.
Depending on the camera, card speed can make a difference, especially in burst mode (many pictures quickly) and high quality movie modes. Having said that, nearly all cards with the same specs will operate the same. Check what speed your camera needs to operate at full speed then choose among the cards that offer those specs.
This is interesting: The CompactFlash Performance Database The website author tests different cards in different brands of cameras. For the Canon EOS-1Ds, for example, he says:
Quoted write speeds on different cards vary from 2.074 megabytes (2.074 x 2[sup]20[/sup] bytes) per second to 870 kilobytes (870 x 2[sup]10[/sup] bytes) per second for the same type of file.