Buying memory cards and batts

lisarhinehart · June 24, 2009

Hello

Do you have any recs for memory or batts? I want to buy them ASAP, and will probably post something on dgrin as well.

A fellow smugger recc'd SANYO ENELOOP AA 2000 mAh 4 Battery Pack
Ultra Low Discharge NiMH
1 Free 4 Cell Battery Case
3-5 $9.77 per 4 Pack 6 or more $9.57-1, several others agreed with him, plus they are currently on sale--

.

I don't think anyone has said anything about mem cards to me, though. Thoughts about those or the recc'd batts? --Lisa

rainbow · June 24, 2009

Sandisk has rebates (in form of debit cards) on some CF and SDHC cards through June 27 when purchased from specific vendors:

http://64.225.152.254/rebates/SandiskCards062709.pdf

The savings are significant. I use their Extreme III CF cards.

Art Scott · June 24, 2009

I started out using Lexar as they were the mostly higly visible in mag ads and such...then I grabbed a SanDisk and then a PQI (slow, slow, slow slow...) then I tried Transcend after a lot of research.....I have had failures withh all (except the PQI...I returned it to store for another Lexar).....anyway I printed off all the specs and saw that all the top line flash memory companies had dang near the same specs....but at the time Transcend hada bit better than average on their specs (I was checking Transcends line of Cards against Lexars Pro Line and at the time SanDisk Extreme 2 cards...Transcend did not have multi lines).....but their price was a bit lower.....that is when I emailed customer service and asked how they could sell a high end card at a lower price and found out that they mfg'ed for a lot of non brand name companies who actually put labels claiming a faster speed than the actual speed of the card.....but they guaranteed me that all their cards met the requirements set by the govt and at the time a 88X card was at least 88 speed to a possible 90 but if one is found to be slower it will be exchanged........
so i gave them a try for an 2gb lexar was now down to $100 (the origianl 2 cost me 189.99 each) and the Transcend card was at a mere $75 at 8gb (on Sale reg, price was 113.99) at ZipZoom Fly.....so I bought 2 (the limit)....so far I had purcahsed all cards at ZZF....then New Egg had a sale and I bought 6 more ($18) andat one point NE was down to $15 and I had 3 hours left and no money to more than another 2.....so now I have 10 Transcends and 2 lexars left.............
I had a Lexar fail 2 days be fore a wedding and they overnighted a replacement to me......SanDisk was not as helpful when their card corrupted....they did not replce until they received the corrupt card first........both Lexar and SanDisk cards corrupted in less than 6 months....my oldes Transcend card is now almost 5 yrs old and only 1 corruption and I caused that one on purpose to see if my Lexar Recovery software would recover from other cards....it does and it is one of the best recover softwares I haveever used.......so far I have not lost one file to corrupt cards Image Rescue has recovered every file on all the cards plus it recoverd files that I had not lost they were still readble by the software after being written over at least a dozen times..........

I have been real happy with my Transcends and Lexars for their customer service.....I was not impressed with SanDisk's Customer service.....because when i called Lexar and told them I had a bad card they wanted me to plug it in to an internet connected machine so they could test it......I askedthe SanDisk Techie if he could test over the phone and he said no!!! only Lexar does that as far as he knows........so I got a replacement for the SanDisk and sold it on Ebay.........

ChatKat · June 25, 2009

San Disk and Eneloops
I use the Sandisk cards without one failing in 7 years of shooting digital. I had one card screw up because I pulled it out wrong with the camera on and lost 4 pix.

I like the eneloops,...but you need a heap of them if you shoot more than one flash and you use the battery packs that take 8 of them. I bought an extra long power strip to hold all the battery chargers for multiple cameras and related stuff.

Scott_Quier · June 25, 2009

lisarhinehart wrote:

Hello

Do you have any recs for memory or batts? I want to buy them ASAP, and will probably post something on dgrin as well.

A fellow smugger recc'd SANYO ENELOOP AA 2000 mAh 4 Battery Pack
Ultra Low Discharge NiMH
1 Free 4 Cell Battery Case
3-5 $9.77 per 4 Pack 6 or more $9.57-1, several others agreed with him, plus they are currently on sale-- .

I don't think anyone has said anything about mem cards to me, though. Thoughts about those or the recc'd batts? --Lisa

I can second the battery recommendation. Thomas Distributing has been nothing but gold for me. I was using some of these and they held up for the better part of two years. But, when they failed, they failed hard - no warning.

I've been using the eneloop for about 6 months and they have been performing quite nicely.

As for memory ... On the recommendation from Art Scott I tried a Transcend (from NewEgg.com) and was quite pleased with it. Then, I bought the 50D and found that it had a much faster writing capability - faster than my card. So I went back to NewEgg and bought four of these. I've been using these for since about Oct 2008 and couldn't be happier.

I have a bunch of 2GB Sandisk Ultra II and some 4GB Sandisk Ultra II cards from when I was shooting with Canon 20D and 30D cameras - these were the slowest cards available that were faster than the write buffer of the camera (I figured there was no sense in buying more card than I needed

). Some of these are about 4 years old.

I received a pair of off-name (something like "One Data" or Data1 or something like that - I guess that tells you how often those cards make it into the camera) 4GB cards when I bought my 50D cameras. They work. They are slow. They have been relegated to 3rd string backups.

In total, I think I have:

Ten 2GB Sandisk Ultra II
Four 4GB Sandisk Ultra II
Four 4GB Transcend TS4GCF300
Two 4GB No-Names

None of my cards have failed. No corruption in any image. And, one of the cards even went through the wash and is still in service.

When considering Bang-for-the-Buck, I would also recommend Transcend cards - they just work as advertised and are less expensive than many other alternatives.

divamum · June 25, 2009

Newegg and zipzoomfly all the way - have been buying memory from both for years now, and always been satisfied.

I also second Transcend as a brand - I started using their SD cards for my digital recording rig (it was the only card my particular unit would accept in larger sizes), and have continued using the brand in my camera without any failures to date.

With my Rebel XT I used an A-data CF card - picked it up cheap from Newegg (I think the 2g card I had was $5 or something like that!) and it was actually the best of the cards I used in that camera. With the XT, you can easily get away with 2g and 4g cards because the files aren't that huge, so if there's a deal somewhere there's no harm in stocking up! Even with my xsi I find the 2g sd cards I already had are fine (as long as I have enough of them

) and those are often heavily discounted...

(And does anybody else find it amusing that we all want humungo cards so we don't need to swap so often, when just a few years ago we were changing rolls of film every 36 or 48 shots?

)

Scott_Quier · June 25, 2009

divamum wrote:

With my Rebel XT I used an A-data CF card - picked it up cheap from Newegg (I think the 2g card I had was $5 or something like that!) and it was actually the best of the cards I used in that camera. With the XT, you can easily get away with 2g and 4g cards because the files aren't that huge, so if there's a deal somewhere there's no harm in stocking up! Even with my xsi I find the 2g sd cards I already had are fine (as long as I have enough of them ) and those are often heavily discounted...

(And does anybody else find it amusing that we all want humungo cards so we don't need to swap so often, when just a few years ago we were changing rolls of film every 36 or 48 shots? )

A-Data - that's the name of the no-name. No failures yet, but they are slow.

As for card size - I like to limit the number of eggs I put into a basket. A 4GB get's me about 200 shots (Canon 50D, RAW) on a card. The flip side is that I increase the risk of damage to the camera pins each time I swap a card. No issues yet - just take my time and don't force it.

jhelms · June 25, 2009

I've been using Lexar in my D200 and have a few Sandisk SD cards for some other smaller cameras.

I reformat in-camera frequently and have several smaller cards instead of a few mammoth ones.

The Maha / Powerex batteries are awesome - check my post here about the cool customer service that I just got from them!

kensington · June 27, 2009

For Batteries and charger go to Thomas Distributing. I shoot flash alot so I do not worry about slow discharge otherwise I would buy Eneloops, I have had Energizer rechargables which I liked but switched to Sanyo 2700's. As far as the charger I went with the Maha C-9000 awesome charger.

Memeory cards, I love my SanDisk! Bought some Ducati's last year which are blazing fast in my D200 and Nexto eXtreme PSD. I believe the new Extreme IV's are the same speed (45mb/s?) I've been using Ulta II's then Ducati's for almost 5 years without a failure.

divamum · June 27, 2009

Scott_Quier wrote:

A-Data - that's the name of the no-name. No failures yet, but they are slow..

Really? Mine was the fastest of my CF cards in the XT. Maybe it was a different "flavour" of card or, of course, I just don't shoot fast enough for it to have been a problem!

That said, I picked up one CRAPPY SD card in a sale at Target in an emergency one day (read: doofus here didn't pack her bag carefully enough

) - it's a PNY and it was soooooo slow that I gave it to my daughter for her Nintendo instead

. Total waste of time in the xsi.

Art Scott · June 27, 2009

divamum wrote:

That said, I picked up one CRAPPY SD card in a sale at Target in an emergency one day (read: doofus here didn't pack her bag carefully enough ) - it's a PNY and it was soooooo slow that I gave it to my daughter for her Nintendo instead . Total waste of time in the xsi.

I too bought a PNY and quickly returned it for the same reason...........as the saying goes .....it was so slow that if it had been any fast it would have been recording backwards.....

Scott_Quier · June 27, 2009

divamum wrote:

Really? Mine was the fastest of my CF cards in the XT. Maybe it was a different "flavour" of card or, of course, I just don't shoot fast enough for it to have been a problem!

That said, I picked up one CRAPPY SD card in a sale at Target in an emergency one day (read: doofus here didn't pack her bag carefully enough ) - it's a PNY and it was soooooo slow that I gave it to my daughter for her Nintendo instead . Total waste of time in the xsi.

This is what I got though it came with my 50D when I bought it from Newegg.com rather than from Amazon. I'm not saying that the A-Data cards are un-reliable as I've yet to have such an issue with them. They are demonstratably slower than the Transcender cards in my camera (A-Data at 133x and the Transcender at 300x).

The difference is that the 50D uses, I believe, the UDMA protocol to transport/write data to the card whereas the XT do not - the A-Data cards at 133x are fast enough to keep up with the XT write function.

lisarhinehart · June 28, 2009

speed
Thanks everyone for your comments and tips-- I really appreciate it!

When you are talking about cf card speed, this will help with writing the images, will it also help with transfering images from the cf card onto my computer?

ziggy53 · June 28, 2009

lisarhinehart wrote:

Thanks everyone for your comments and tips-- I really appreciate it!

When you are talking about cf card speed, this will help with writing the images, will it also help with transfering images from the cf card onto my computer?

Read and write speeds of memory cards are somewhat dependent upon the device they are used with and this speed is different by the device and the particular card. If you use a UDMA card, for instance, you really should also use a UDMA card reader to realize maximum transfer speeds.

Do check the Rob Galbraith site to see how different cards and cameras affect read and write speeds. This empirical testing is much more indicative to actual transfer speeds than the manufacturer's speed ratings.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

MT Stringer · June 28, 2009

Just my two cents...
I've been using Kingston CF cards for the past several years in 4, 8 and 16gb sizes. No failures or problems for me. And I have used them in a Rebel XT, 20D, 30D, 40D and now the 1D MK III. This equates to over 25K shots.

Like others, I also bought batteries from Thomas Distributing - 2700 mah Powerex and a 8 cell charger.

Hope this helps.
Mike

lisarhinehart · July 13, 2009

batt charger
So I went with Sanyo batts-- how important is it for me to get a sanyo charger? Sanyo says very, and I'm sure they are not at all biased

I already own a ~2 hour charger (energizer)-- which I'm imagining woudl be hard onthe batts b/c it's agressive, and perhaps b/c it isn't the same brand, but I'm thinking that it'd work fine in a pinch.

The sanyo is about $25 and a ~8 hour charger. I imagine it would be kinder on the batteries, name brand or not, and good to charge them from home, in prep for an event or whatever.

I bought so many batts and don't typically use a whole lot of flash, so I'm thinking that I could use the 8 hour to charge them from home in prep for an event and bring my energizer for the wedding.

I did invest a decent amount of $ in my batts so I'd rather not ruin them by being stingy on a charger. Advice anyone?

Art Scott · July 14, 2009

I always prefer to have the same charger as my batts because if i have a ton of failures and send the batts back to company and I am asked what I used to charge them on.....YOU"RE charger sir.....that way they can't just say well it was the charger, our batts will only work correctly when charged on our charger..........
At the same time I would have opted for a used quantum battery/charger for my flash units....normally I get close to 1k shots bfore my quantums are too low to work properly and then I go to my stash of AA Duracell rechargeables......

kensington · July 14, 2009

The LaCrosse or the Maha MH-C9000 are very popular, have nice refresh features, etc. Check out Thomas Distributing.

Buying memory cards and batts

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