digital camera memory cards. take a 1gb card for instance, why are some over £20 and some £8???

Question

there are loads of dirrerent brands, but surely the memory card has the same parts and space!!

Answer 1

Yeah, that's true - some memory cards are much cheaper than others. The reason for this is because the better-known names are the ones that are the most preferred and therefore, cost more. In addition to that, the suppliers of the product charge more for the better quality ones and therefore, the people who sell them have to make a profit, meaning they too have to raise the price.

Personally, however, I think they're the same; I have one of the worst makes ever (SD card for my Wii) and it works perfectly. It doesn't really make a difference, believe it or not!!!

Answer 2

Technically there can be major differences between cards of the same format.

Flash technology, as used on these cards, has a limited number of writes to each cell.

Some of the more expensive cards have a 'wear level algorithm' or other program in the firmware to extent the life of the card. This can make a significant difference to the life.

There are also differences in the read and write times for these.

That said, some of the cheaper ones can sometime be better than some of the more expensive ones, there is a lot of brand pricing out there, particulary as it relates to retail sales.

Answer 3

The "write speed" figures in this equation. Slower cards are sold off in job lots and find their way onto ebay, while the faster ones end up in the retail sector. Unless you have a pro camera that can shoot continuous frames, it doesn't matter too much which card you use.

Answer 4

There can be a variety of reasons for this.

First of all there's the source. Some of the really cheap cards come from China where labour rates and quality control can be minimal. In such cases you can get incredible deals except that there's no certainty that the cards will last as long as a more expensive one. You take a risk with those in that you may one day find that the card can't be read to download your images. If you should buy such cards, buy several small ones, not one big one. That way if a card does fail at least you don't lose all your pictures.

A second difference is brand. Like in all markets, some brands tend to be considered premium brands (regardless of whether the products are actually better) and that premium cost a lot more. It's like clothes, you can buy the same thing from two sources and the designer label will cost you twice as much even though it's often the same product. I'd suggest not to get taken in by those kinds of marketing strategies.

A third difference is proprietary technology. The Sony memory stick is exclusive to Sony and the Olympus XD card is exclusive to Olympus. As a result of this the manufacturers can charge whatever they want since you have no choice but to buy them if you happen to own such a camera. By contrast the Secure Digital cards which most cameras use are much less expensive in part because people have a choice which to buy for their cameras and because they sell so many of them they gain from economies of scale. Of course you can get memory sticks that are not made by Sony but those manufacturers still have to pay a license fee to Sony for each card made and that continues to inflate the price.

Another reason is performance. Memory card manufacturers are constantly trying to push the envelope in terms of memory speed. Early cards were painfully slow whereas many of the latest ones can go as high as 20 MB per second, I've noticed one that can go to 40MB per second. With each new speed increment comes a temporary increase in price. That's because it's a new technology so the consumer has to pay for the new tooling in the factories and pay for the R & D. Once that's all paid for, the price gradually drops. If you have a high end SLR that operates at something like six frames per second, you want to spend the money for a high end card because that gives you a card that can keep up with the camera and will allow you to achieve those speeds consistently. On the other hand, if you have a typical camera, there's no need to buy high speed cards, they'd be faster than the camera can process the data so you'd never benefit from the speed which would be a waste of money.

In our competitive world manufacturers are also constantly trying to find ways to trim costs to become more competitive. In the process they sometimes find more creative and cheaper ways to make a card. Those who can figure this out get a competitive advantage in that they can sell for less and thereby capture a greater market share. The only risk with such cards is that sometimes the new technology ends up being a bit less reliable in the short term. I'd tend to avoid this kind of stuff until it's been around for a year or two. By then any bugs will have been sorted out.

Like all things manufactured, there are also differing qualities. Generally you do get what you pay for. Sometimes the high end expensive cards are also better made and provide a longer more reliable life to justify the increased price. Unfortunately that argument is not always valid especially if the price is simply due to brand as opposed to quality.

Finally there's the tax angle too. Duties and taxes levied on a product are usually a percentage of the wholesale price. As a result of that a card with a high wholesale price will end up taking a larger hit in terms of taxes and this is then reflected in a significantly inflated retail price when compared to a cheaper card that takes a lower tax hit.

How do you sort through all of this stuff and decide what a reasonable price is? You can't really. You can surf the Internet to see if someone has tested the different cards and get a sense from that. You can also check with friends who use their cameras a lot and find out what they use and whether it's reliable. That's often the best way to decide.

I use a Canon Powershot G7 as my P&S camera and two Nikon SLRs for serious work, a D70s and a D200. In all cases I've standardized on SanDisk cards, Secure Digital for the Canon and Compact Flash for the Nikons. I've found these cards to be incredibly reliable and even able to take a lot of abuse, particularly the compact flash format. That doesn't mean they're the best or that you should buy only those at any price, it simply means they're reliable and a good candidate to consider.

For the Canon I use a high speed secure digital card and the marriage works well, the card and the camera are well balanced together. For the Nikon D70s I use the SanDisk Extreme III cards allowing me to operate at three frames per second with rarely any hesitation of delays. With the Nikon D200 I use the extreme IV ones which are twice as fast and I find that the camera is able to operate at six frames per second almost continuously. Again there is a good marriage between the camera and the card. If I were to use the faster card in the D70s I'd not really get a performance boost at all. So that's what I use and why.

Finally, whether you buy the most expensive or the cheapest memory cards on the market, eventually each one will fail. Card failure is a certainty like death and taxes, all that's unknown is how many times you can write to it before it finally fails. As a result it's never a good idea to buy a huge card.

You can get 16B compact flash cards these days which, with my D200, would allow me to store about three thousand images at minimum. In a way I'd love that, it means not carrying around a lot of cards and I'd be able to do a lot of images in the process. A typical shoot for me is usually no more than a thousand images so that gives me the capacity for at least three shoots. However I would never buy and use one of those.

Think about it. No matter how rugged the card is, it's not perfect. Those are a lot of images to lose if the card suddenly fails or you accidentally drop it into a lake or something. So I use lower capacity cards and a lot of them. This way accidentally damaging a card or losing it is not a devastating disaster since only a few images are lost instead of all of them. There's an added benefit too. A one or two gigabyte card is a lot cheaper to buy than a 16GB card even if you buy sixteen gigabytes worth of them. Sure it means carrying around a lot of them and changing cards all the time but that's a lot less painful than losing everything on a single card. Something to think about.

I hope this answers your question.

Answer 5

a million GB is inexpensive now - you'll get it for decrease than 20 euro / 3 pounds even 4 GB playing cards are usable i imagine, and also you'll get those from about sixty 5 euro / ninety pounds style isn't significant, maximum person-pleasant playing cards are already good for decades of use.

Answer 6

Mainly the name you pay for the publicity, you may as well buy the cheaper ones as they are all the same inside and never buy the latest model as it will be half the price in a few months.

Answer 7

There is no difference apart from the brand name on them or the profit being made by the shop....I got a cheap one from play.com ............2gb for cheaper than some 1gb elsewhere

Answer 8

The SD ones are cheap whlst the XD ones are still quite a bit more money

Answer 9

they are all made by samsung, who own the patents, so buy with confidence...