It's Not That Bad

Ok, so I ranted and raved earlier in the week about how I needed to buy new flash cards. I said that in order to afford them I was going to have to turn to a life of crime, or at the very least sell a few of my less important organs.

Well it turns out to be not quite that bad after all. It turns out there are still a couple advantages to using a camera as old as mine. One of them is the fact that it won't even support the latest and greatest cards on the market, even if I could buy them. For reasons that only a computer geek like me would be fascinated by, my camera can only support cards up to a maximum of 2gb, and most of those use a format that it can't read.

What's a guy like me to do then. well buy a bunch of 1gb cards of course. The advantage is that any one that knows why they want a faster card, usually won't put up with a card as measly as 1gb, so I can get them cheap. I got four of these for six bucks each.

There is still a small chance that my camera won't be able to use these cards, but at that price, and with Amazon's return policy, why not give them a try right?

I think I should mention at this point though, that to realize any performance gains, there is still one more purchase to be made.

Flash memory cards are very finicky devices. Sure they work in most any device with the correctly shaped slot now days, but that doesn't mean that every device you use them with is giving you the same performance. When you are shopping for SD or CF cards, the manufacturer will tell you that they perform at ten or twelve or 30 megabytes per second, but thats not really the truth.

The truth is that different devices will interact with each card differently, and each card will interact with each device differently. If I were to buy these new cards and keep using my same cheap card reader I might see only a small gain in performance, or none at all. The unfortunate fact is that the only way to actually tell what kind of performance one type of card will give you with your card reader is to try it out and see.

With that in mind it was also necessary to upgrade my card reader. I picked up this one for a decent price.

Full Disclosure: I do not have an Amazon merchant account. Clicking on those links does not in any way support me or my photography habit. "But" you might say, "why don't you get an Amazon merchant account and start earning a little on side for the 'Get Bill a new camera fund'?" You know thats a pretty darned good idea, and maybe some day when I have enough readers I'll do that.