A few months ago, I wrote about trusting brand name cards and I also mentioned (after returning from Mexico) that pro cards like SanDisk’s Extreme series certainly live up to their billing being able to shoot from the 40+ degrees C in Mexico to the – 25 that I shot in this Christmas. And while generally I’m standing by my claim to go brand name when it comes to getting the best cards (remember there are also “geek” brands like RiTek, just stay away from store labels), I’m going to add one more thing to the list of things to do when you are thinking about getting memory – and this is something that I should have done and it’s something that has been mentioned all over the ‘net.
Before you use a card the first time, take it through a dry run of the situation that you’ll be shooting in, including the processing.
You see, I didn’t do this… last week, I bought a 2GB SanDisk UltraII from Future Shop for $75 (basically half off) and even though I checked online for people having problems or issues with this card and the Canon 30D (including my lenses) and found little or nothing, I also looked for comparisons with the Extreme III line and found that the only real difference was the environmental ratings (also finding that there are a number of people who have had Ultra IIs function well at extreme temps as well). So I took the card on faith to take pictures of my nephew in RAW. Thinking that because I’m going to be moving my photo storage/post production to Aperture (which really shined even though it gave me a bit of a scare this weekend with this experience), I should shoot RAW and not JPG, I might as well use the tool as it was meant to be used. A note on that, I think that if you are considering the choice of moving up to a more pro photo production system/shoebox, I would think it would only really be worth it if you can’t adjust the pictures that you take the way that you want in iPhoto or Picasa and/or if you tend to take pictures in bursts and/or if you tend to make a number of versions of your images (that is where the non distructive features really shine).
The shoot was a blast and all the images were showing up fine on the card before I took it out. I even ran into friends on the way home that I showed my little poser off to. But then at home I found that the majority of the pictures were corrupt and putting the card back into the camera confirmed it. Thankfully, the extra money that I spent on the Extreme III for the recovery software Rescue Pro (I could have used Lexar’s bundled Image Rescue as well) was able to pull out the pictures in a manner that the various apps that I have (including Aperture) could understand.
After recovering the pictures, I did some tests with the 1GB Lexar 80X Pro and my 2GB Extreme III and confirmed that the Ultra II won’t allow me to properly write RAW data. I didn’t try with jpg, because it’s not something that I’m going to consider from here on out – well that isn’t really the case, as I might take panorama frames in JPG as well as RAW.
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