Jacobs Digital | Memory Cards

No matter how great your camera is, you won’t be capturing any photographs without sufficient ‘digital memory’. Here’s a byte-sized run down of what to look out for:

The higher the card capacity (in Gigabytes ‘GB’), the greater the number of images you can capture and store, before needing to download the images and reformat the card to free up space.

Common formats include postage stamp sized Secure Digital or ‘SD’, along with microSD used in mobile phones and media players, higher capacity SDHC available up to 32GB and the new SDXC cards currently available up to 64GB - but with up to 2TB (terabytes) in the pipeline. A larger capacity is essential for those recording High Def video alongside photos.

Utilised mainly by DSLRs is the robust CompactFlash, while another format is Sony’s Memory Stick Pro Duo.

Look out also for cards boasting high reading and writing speeds – particularly useful for those who shoot more memory hungry (slower to write and access) RAW files, not to mention HD video, which generates particularly large file sizes. For example,SanDisk’s new Extreme and Extreme Pro range offer transfer rates of 60MB/per sec and 90MB/per sec, respectively.