All of my images captured with the cameras I am using at the moment a Canon 7D and a Canon 5D are recorded onto digital memory cards known as CF cards or "Compact Flash".
The advantages of this type of card are, the cards hold vast amounts of storage data and are the Ideal media for storing vast quantity's of photographs.They range in size from a couple of GB to approx 64 GB for top end storage. They come in a variety of different types,speeds and makes and price ranges to suit. The faster the read write speed of the card the quicker response time you will get from your camera and computer
Photographer's use these cards to store their photos because they are very small and potable and can be easily carried in a shirt pocket. They are very compact and can be sent through the postal service very cheaply because they are very light in weight. They are relatively cheap to buy and top end cards are very efficient at reading and writing data, which allow fast downloads/upload speeds from a camera and uploading to a computer.
There are mainly 3 main manufactures in this field who produce these types of cards and they are:
Sandisk
Lexar
Kingston
More information on compact flash cards see the link below
This link below is a technical link from the encyclopedia Wikipedia and gives loads of information about compact flash cards and their technical data
Although information on Wikepedia is not verified by any organisation it is a free encyclopidia that anyone can add to or edit. I have always found information on this site to relevant and true
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Comparison's
I have used all of the cards mentioned above and have found there are some distinct advantages of some cards compared to others.These I have outlined below
Sandisk
Shown below are some examples of Sandisk's CF and SD cards
The biggest manufacturer of these type of cards. They have a vast range of cards to suit the amature to the professional. They are very well made rugged cards aimed at all levels and branches of photography
At first I used to use a lot of Sandisk cards. There is a large variety of cards on offer from this company. There are cards to suit all types of digital photography. There are really fast cards which have very fast read write speeds, ideal for press photographers who need speed at hand instantaneously.
There are HD(high definition) CF cards designed for photogrphers who use there camera's for video. You can buy top end very fast cards that cater for HD recording nowadays something that all camera manufactures are using now. Read write speeds have to be very high to record and playback HD movies
There are also slower cards made by this company with slower read/ write speeds tailored for the amateur photographer who's not bothered about speed. These cards are a lot cheaper to buy but downloading large raw files from your camera to your pc can take a lot longer and images take a long time to open
However I have found that a lot of these cards from Sandisk have been counterfeited and have actually bought some of these fake goods. They were supplied by Amazon and they are not sure how these counterfitted goods have infiltrated their stocks. I have 2 faulty cards bought from Amazon and both have crashed my camera. I cannot say if these cards are faulty because they are fakes,it's hard to tell. On two occasions I have lost a vast amount of images and I'm very reluctant to use this make of card again
Follow this link below to Sandisk's website. It shows a variety of video's on the correct card to use for your photography and their specifications
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Lexar
Another large card manufacture of CF and SD cards. In comparison to all the other cards I prefer Lexar cards. I haven't come across any fakes yet. I now tend to use a lot of high end Lexar cards. These cards are very fast and efficient cards and have never let me down. They are competitively priced compared with Sandisk's products and work out a little cheaper for a high quality card. I have moved over to this brand because of all the fakes infiltrating Sandisk's cards
I tend to use the 300x or 400x speed cards which are more than adequote to cater for all my photogrphy needs. In comparison, Sandisk's top of their line pro series cards are the best you can buy way out of my price range
Shown here is one of Lexar's top of the range Cf cards which delivers 90 meg a second download speeds and the technical data taken from their website
Link to Lexar's site
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Kingston
The Kingston cards tend to be a lot cheaper cards and haven't got the speeds of the top end cards of Sandisk and Lexar. I have used these cards in the past but now would only use these for geneal use photography as the performance of this type of cards are very slow. They really lack the performance especially for high end HD video shooting or handling very large raw files that most cameras manufactures are producing nowadays
Follow this link to Kingston's page for CF cards
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Over all you get what you pay for and I tend to pay the extra for a more efficient faster card. In comparison with all the other makes of CF card, I now choose the high end Lexar cards for my photography. They are very fast, efficient and reliable and also prove very cost effective
SD Cards
Another common format of memory cards that I use in my compact camera are "SD" or Secure Digiatal cards (shown below),which again are similar to CF cards but are smaller and cheaper but do not hold as much data as CF's. I also use this type of card in my mobile phone and on my
computer
Cloud storage and External hard drives
Once stored onto these cards I upload the recorded images onto my computer for further secure storage and image manipulation. I use a USB lead and a very fast Lexar CF card reader which transfers my images from my camera to my Pc in super fast times. Using Lexar cards and my card reader shown below a lexor professional it transfers a 25 mb file/pohto in less than a second and takes about 30 sec's to trasfer 1GB of phto's to my PC. You get what you pay for and this was one of my best buys
I then trasfer my images as a backup solution to other external hard drives and cloud storage online another very good form of storage and security as an extra security measure to insure against loss of my images
Using cloud storage is relatively inexpensive and costs me appox £105.00 for 3 years unlinited storage. I think that this kind of storage is the way forward and for ease of use and convenience would rate it 8/10. It does have it's down side all of your data or photo's have to be uploaded online and all this depends on your ISP's speeds and policies etc. Some ISP's have a cap on the upload/download you can use so it pay's to check out your package
People also worry about their data being kept secure, well in my opinion,it is more secure than your home pc being hacked online and data stolen from under your nose,ask yourself how many times has this happened to you? Cloud storage is very efficient and very secure and a lot of the country's top companies now use this type of storage
Apple has recently joined the cloud "Band Wagon" storage and now offer a free 5 GB cloud storage to mac,I pad and I phone users and additional storage can be added for various fees
The main companies include:
Mozy
Livedrive
Carbonite
Yay, I'm on at last, wow, you have been working hard I have alot of catching up to do!
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