MEMORY CARDS

Last month's article on the same subject, gave you a brief overview of the operation of a digital camera, the need for memory cards, and various types (SD, CFexpress, etc.) that are now available in the market.

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This month we will go deeper into the specifications, and cover various tips and best practices. So, read on!

Memory Card Capacity

When the first memory cards appeared, the storage capacity used to be in megabytes (MB). The technology has now advanced to the extent that you can now get cards that have capacities thousands of times more than that.

There is no card with a capacity of less than several gigabytes (GB) in the market now with some even going to thousands of GB, that is terabytes (TB). As we go to press, the card with the highest capacity on the market is a CFexpress card of 4 TB!

All the mentioned types are available in various capacities, though some cards like CFexpress offer much higher capacities as they are based on the latest technology. If we do not consider CF, CFast, and XQD cards as they are on the way out, the next higher capacity is available in SDXC cards. These have an upper limit of 2 TB. If you are going for the SDXC cards, please consider those with UHS-II interface as they are faster but come at a higher price.

How much capacity you should carry with you when you go out to shoot depends on many factors. Let us look at some of these.

The megapixels of your camera, the more this is, the larger will be the memory requirement.

The file formats you use, examples are TIFF, JPEG, RAW, etc. TIFF files occupy the largest memory space and are now not popular.

JPEG is the most well-known format but the size of the file apart from the number of pixels you are using (commonly called the 'Size' setting), the camera can also compress the image to 1/2 or % or % the size (with a corresponding loss in the image quality). This is known as the 'Quality' setting. Thus, depending on these settings, the size can vary enormously. However, if you are using JPEG format exclusively (we do not recommend this), please use the maximum number of pixels and the lowest compression possible.