Are you using the right SD Card? Do you understand the difference? No, I am not talking about brand, that argument can be almost as bad as should I buy a Ford or a Chevy. I am talking about the little number in the circle you will find somewhere on the label. This is know as the class of the card and comes in 2,4,6,8,and 10. As you might guess, class is the minimum MB's per second that can be written to the card. This is where the difference comes into play.
Speed matters when you are shooting at a burst or are doing a video at 1080p HD. A lot of information needs to be written to the card and a slow card can degrade the performance of your camera. This is where the price difference comes in to play as well. The faster the card the higher the price. So it might be best to buy the fastest you can afford.
Before I finish lets look at a couple other tips that I have learned over the years. First many experts agree that it is better to reformat your card rather than just delete the pictures. This removes any errors that might be there and sets the card back to the proper format for the camera. Next, depending on how you use your camera, it might be better to have four 8 GB cards instead of one 32 GB. The reason for this is simple. When you are on vacation you can use a different card every two days. If one of the cards goes bad (and it can happen) you have only lost 1/4 of your shots. That is much better then losing all the vacation pictures.
So there you have it, my little SD cards tips. Do you have any other tips that might be useful?
Just deleting images (instead of reformatting) can also leave fragments of the images on the memory card and you'll eventually notice that you can no longer take as many photos on the card as you once could.
ReplyDeleteAlso beware, once you've formatted your card, images cannot be recovered (recovery software can often recover images if they've only been deleted).
Format with caution, and often! :)
Good points indeed. Thanks for the added information.
ReplyDelete