Does it make sense to buy high capacity CF card for your camera?
Posted by Prashant - 01/12/09 at 01:12:15 amThere are few trips whose itinerary is enough blow you away. National Geographic expeditions are one among such trips
If 12 UNESCO World Heritage sites, one private jet and 22 days does not make it a trip-of-a-lifetime, what will? You are almost tempted to click on “Request a reservation”..all this until you scroll down to a point in the webpage where the cost for this once-in-a-lifetime trips becomes visible. Then its like popping “blue pill”, you are suddenly ejected out of the holodeck of your fantasy world in to the real world. 55K USD!!! OMGH!!
While the private jet and the UNESCO world heritage sites are not affordable, at least for now, a plan to trek the north east India this winter is brewing. It will be freakingly cold. It will be beautiful and it will be one amazing journey(hopefully). I had prepared a check list and last week end was going through it and was checking items off the to-be-purchased list. One important item on that list was the camera memory card and for my camera its the CF card. Currently I have 4 GB Sandisk III Extream CF card. Till date it has delivered awesome performance on my Nikon D300. Even in the fast continious mode. But with the trip lasting for close to 15 days, I would surely need much more memory than that, especially when I am planning on shooting in RAW. So the question on my mind was what should be the ideal capacity of the memory card that I need to buy?
I checked couple of places and they were selling upto 32GB CF card for close to INR 7000. A normal NEF (Nikon’s RAW file) has an average size of 12-14 MB. So if I buy a 32 GB CF card, I can take close to 2600 photos in RAW format ( 32000/14) which I guess should be more than enough. So choice is obvious, I should go for a 32GB CF card right? Nope..not so soon. Now lets calculate the cost per MB that I am paying for CF card. Fairly simple arithmetic;
Cost per MB for CF card = 7000/32000 = Rs. 0.22 per MB
Now in market you get these devices called “Protable photo storage devices”, these devices have inbuilt card reader and a portable (generally 2.5″, similar to a laptop HDD) hard dirve. So you can plug in any CF card and trasfer all your photos to the hard drive with one click of a button. Generally most of these devices support virtually all types of memory cards. We have several players in this market including, Nexto, Jobo, Sanho, Digital Foci, Wolverine etc. Now it gets interesting if we do the above math for some of these devices. For example for a Sanho hyperdrive Space which comes with a 40GB capacity and sells for Rs 8109 the math would look like;
Cost per MB = Rs. 8109/40000 = Rs. 0.20 Per MB
I know Rs. 0.02 is a meager amount, but heck its still less than Rs. 0.22
Nexto Extream 160GB model sells for close to Rs. 16000
Cost per MB = Rs. 16000/160000 = Rs. 0.10 Per MB
A Wolverine Picpac 80GB sells at Rs. 5640
Cost per MB = Rs. 5640/80000 = Rs. 0.07 Per MB
All these costs include the customs you pay when you buy then in India. So if you directly purchase it in US it will be even lesser.
So does it make sense to buy a high capacity CF card? Before you make that decision, lets see what are the other advantages/disadvantages;
disadvantages:
- Even thought it fits in your palm, its not as easy as carrying a CF card - True, but common, we can let this go. dump it in a corner of the backpack it should be fine.
- You need to worry about another additional source of power – Yes, while traveling with every additional power source you need to worry about, your pain increases 4 folds. But most of these devices have a really decent battery life. So even this should not be a challenge.
- Its not very fast – Yep, transferring photos from your card to the device is relatively slow. To transfer 4GB of photos from a CF card in the worst case might take 20-30 mins, but while traveling 30 mins should not be a big concern.
- Safety against HDD crash - This is a very genuine concern. As per the reviews, people have had bad experiences with the hard drive in these devices especially the low cost devices like Wolverine and Sanho.
So if you;
- Travel frequently, take lots of pictures, experiment with you camera a lot
- Ready for slightly higher risk
then a photo storage device makes more sense else a high capacity card should work just fine. Also with the cost of the netbooks falling with every passing day, it would be interesting to compare photo storage device against netbooks. The other day I saw a pocket size netbook costing INR 11K. Did not check the specs but if this comes with a 160GB HDD and a CF card reader, then that opens up lot more options.
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