Memory cards

The 2 main memory cards that are used for photography nowadays are Compact Flash and Secure Digital. Both cards  are very common nowadays and can be bought from most high street camera shops or computer stores.

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

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

The type of memory cards that my camera uses are Compact Flash cards and they come in a variety of different types,speeds 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

There are mainly 3 main manufactures in this field who produce these cards and they are:

Sandisk

Lexar

Kingston

More information on compact flash cards

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash

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Comparison's

I have used all of the cards above and have found there are some distinct advantages of some cards compared to others.These are 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

http://www.sandisk.com/consumer-products/camera?utm_source=Camera_link&utm_medium=ProductUsage&utm_campaign=HomePageTracking

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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

http://www.lexar.com/products/compactflash

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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

http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/flash/photo.asp

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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