Sizing Compact Flash Cards

Earlier tonight, as I was prepping for shooting the Where 2.0 Conference tomorrow in San Jose, I had all my compact flash cards with me laid out on the desk. For whatever reason, I snapped a picture and tweeted it saying, “I finally feel like I have enough CF cards for just about anything life throws at me. Maybe.”

Here’s the iPhone image, slightly blurry since there’s no Macro mode:

Yah. That’s 48GB of cards there. The six 4GB SanDisk Extreme III 30MBs Edition cards are the ones I bought after doing the analysis that went into my recent Flashonomics post. The others are cards that I have bought over the last year or two. The marble table top, well, that’s the desk in my room at the Fairmont. Not really my style.

After posting my tweet, a load of tweets came in as replies. So many that I figured answering them in blog form might be a good idea. Here are a few answers to some of the replies:

@brupm wrote: “does not seem enough at all. Don’t see any 32gb. ;-)”, @xxloverxx wrote: “Get a couple 32GBs and you won’t have much to complain about =)”, and @adelcambre wrote: “Why mostly 4GB CF?”

A couple of 32’s might be nice, but right now the 4’s and 8’s are the winners on the price/GB scale. For the Extreme III’s, it’s pretty close between the 4’s and 8’s while the 16’s cost an extra buck per GB. If you’re shopping for Extreme IV’s, the sweet spot is definitely the 8GB size. See my Flashonomics post for more details. Of course, this will change over time.

But there’s another reason that I trend towards 4’s and 8’s. @ahockley hits it on the head by asking, “what are your thoughts on the ‘too many images on one card’ issue and potential for failure? I’m nervous when over 200/card…”

I too don’t like to put too many images on one card. It almost is illogical if you think about it too much as they’re all ending up on spinning media in the end. But I do make instant backups and keep those backups over time. So, it’s not quite silly to think about distributing the load over a few cards rather than concentrating them on one. A hundred to two hundred shots does seem like the sweet spot. And, this is why I ended up going with 4’s instead of 8’s even though the 8GB Extreme III currently have the slightest of edge on the price/GB scale.

Also in the same line of thought, @tarkin2258 tweeted, “Not sure you should keep all pics on 1 card while in the field either. Swap cards occasionally in case one fails or is confiscated.” I’m usually not worried about confiscation, but if you do ever run afoul of law enforcement somewhere and are in a situation where you have to give up a card, then giving up only one 4GB card is a lot better than handing over something larger.

@jnouwen asked: “Do you notice an appreciable difference between the Extreme III and IV cards?”

I can’t say that I do in my camera. Nor do I notice any big difference when I’m pulling data from them onto my computer, at least not between the Extreme III 30MBs edition and the Extreme IV I have (which isn’t one of the new wowzers 45MBs edition cards). I do, however, notice a a difference between all these cards and my Ultra IIs. I’ve not tried to quantify it, but it’s definitely enough to sideline them for other uses.

@twleung notes: “nope. not enough cards. evar.” and @dimsumthinking said: “Then you need a camera with higher resolution or something. Enough memory is just an ‘I dare you to cross this line’ moment.”

To which I reply. Yep. You can never have too many cards or enough resolution. I can’t wait till the day I get a bigger sensor (like, um, maybe a D3x class sensor in a D700-like body) and my sweet spot moves up to 8GB or 16GB cards and I have 24 megapixels to burn. :)