Best Storage for digital camera (EOS 20D)

[sudelb]

Hi,

I want to hear your opinion/experience on choosing storage media for

EOS 20D.

The main question is whether to choose high end CF2 card or

microdrive/CF drive ?

1. CF/microdrives seem to be much faster and cheaper than CF cards.

2. On the down side CF/microdrives seem to be more error prone?

loose the data? and do not work higher than 9000 feet.

 

- Should I aim toward high end (4-5GB) CF drives or buy several 1-

2GB?

- Is X40 X80 speed acceleration on lexar media worth the extra money?

 

Thank you,

Boris

[johnrwoods]

Just get a cf card, if you really think that $99 for a Sandisk 1gb Ultra II (60x) is a lot of money, then youre crazy, because its dropped in price over 50% in the last month or so.

[jimstrutz]

CF cards are faster and genrally more reliable than Microdrives, and they are getting to be cheaper too. I see no reson to use Microdrives any more. I would buy the minimum number of CF cards that you need right now, and buy more later when the price has dropped even more.

 

On the earlier Canon DSLRs the speed of the card has had little effect on the speed of the camera. Perhaps the 20D has the ability to take advantage of the faster cards.

[msitaraman]

You are better off apportioning a part of your money towards hard disk portable storage, or a notebook computer onto which you can periodically offload your pictures.

 

Ask yourself three questions:

 

Q1. How many pics will you shoot between opportunities to offload?

 

Q2. How many pics are you willing to lose in the unlikely event that the card gets corrupted and you can't use recovery software on it?

 

Q3. How long do you want to keep shooting before the 5 second task of switching CF cards in your camera?

 

That should help you choose how many cards, and how big each should be.

[kenneth_beatty]

Yes the 20D (D70,D2H, 1DmkII etc) are fast enough to take advantage of the faster cards and I highly recommend them unless you want your 5fps camera to become a 1fps camera.

 

Buy Sandisk best card on the market with the best price. Get the Ultra II unless you are going to be shooting in the arctic then get the Extremes.

 

Personaly (I like to shoot RAW+Jpeg) I carry 2 or 3 1Gig cards when I take the digital. When the prices drop enough then I'll take 2 or 3 4Gig cards. Remember as well that you don't have to fill up the card before you change it. ( actually leaving a little room can cut down on the chances of a card error)