SD Cards

[Theodoric]

I'm thinking of buying a 512MB SD Card for my camera. Is any brand better (or worse) than any other? Specifically, Amazon offers a Viking one for £25.96, a Kingston one for £25.60 and a Bytestor one for £29.99. I currently use a Bytestor 256MB SD which has given me no problems, but should I go for one of the cheaper 2 (which one?) and save £4.

To confuse the issue, Amazon lists a 512 MB Bytestor SD MLC card that looks the same size as the others for £23.99. A bit of googling gave me the following, which suggests that MLC might be false economy as I take a fair number of video clips.

MLC stands for multi-level cell (MLC) technology
MLC SD(Multi-Level Cell) cards can hold two bits of data per cell. Therefore they have a lower production cost.
I have heard MLC cards usually have slower read/write speeds and therefore they are more suitable for recording still pictures in Digital camera's etc. (where speed isn't too important).

[Paul K]

TBH if you are gonna to use the card heavily then you may be better off paying a little more for it but then we get our camera/ phone memory cards from here
http://www.mobymemory.com/512mb_MMC_...ile_phones.asp
and here
http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/defa...Path=777_4_401
and have had no problems with them at all.One of the cards we have is over 12 months old and gets used quite often as it's for the digital camera

[altis]

There's some test results of various CF and SD cards with a selection of professional digital cameras here:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...e.asp?cid=6007

i dont know anything about SD cards but i know a little about compact flash cards. This might be worth checking out or might be irrelivent to SD cards. The newer and better CompactFlash cards operate at higher speeds which allows the better cameras to attain a higher FPS. As i say, i dont know if that applies to SD cards but if it does then its certainly worth considering.

[MovedGoalPosts]

You can always look at prices on www.crucial.com/uk I've always found their stuff to be good.

[Theodoric]

Originally Posted by MovedGoalPosts

You can always look at prices on www.crucial.com/uk I've always found their stuff to be good.

A bit of a co-incidence here. I have literally just finished installing a 256MB memory module that I bought from Crucial! I shall have a browse - i didn't even that they did memory cards.

[Graham M]

My Nokia 6630 Requires a Dual-Voltage RS-MMC card, does anyone know a good source for these, as the current one (32MB - shouldve been 64 but Vodafone are stingy *******s) is a bit small, especially with MP3 player, Video Capture and 1.3MP Camera.

I have always found Kingston memory to be of good quality...

[andygrif]

It's not as simple as one brand being better than another I'm afraid - I wish it were that simple! Some cameras cope with some brands of card better than others and some so-called high-speed versions of memory cards are not as high speed as they might claim.

And then there's your camera. If you're using a 16 megapixel digital SLR then you're going to want the fastest card in the land, but if you're using a little point and shoot then you're unlikely to notice the difference between any brand of card. It will also depend on your camera's buffer.

I've just bought a few CF cards to test them and there are some big differences. The Jessops card is OK, the SanDisk (standard one) is appaling and the Lexar Pro (80x) is very good.

I would go and bend the ear of your local Jessops, get them to demonstrate how good they are, which one will work best with your camera, then go an buy that brand online.

[Theodoric]

In the end I more or less stuck a pin in and went for the Bytestor Hi-Speed 512MB SD card from Amazon, mainly on the grounds that I already have a trouble-free Bytestor card and a fond hope that Hi-Speed might mean what it says. Anyway, I am impressed by the speed. A 30 second avi clip took only about 10 seconds to process, as opposed to over a minute with my old card. The time to process a photo (and to download to my PC) also seems shorter.