Does the brand of memory matter?

[shay425]

I just recently bought my first digital camera. It's a Fuji. This may sound like a dumb question, but does the brand of memory matter as far as the quality of pictures? I have been researching prices and some brands are cheaper than others.

 

[Brisully]

Brand of memory does not matter in the way an image is going to look. It's not like it used to be with film, where a shot taken with Kodak and Fuji films would differ greatly.

What does matter with a memory card is the speed of the card, i.e. how fast the camera can write the image to the card.

This may help: Lexar Media Card Speeds

 

[shay425]

Thanks so much for your help! One more question...is it best to get several 128MB and 256 MB memory cards or go for the 512MB and 1GB?

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

Size of memory card kind of depends on resolution settings you use. If you shoot in RAW camera format, TIF, or Large/Fine JPG these files take more space so you'll be able to fit fewer pictures on a card. There is a trade off of how often you want to swap cards. Most of the cards are very robust but there are times that you may lose a card or have its contents unretrievable. In that case, having all your pictures on one card would be a bad thing. I typically select a size to give me enough pictures that will get me through one event (parade, party, game, etc.) to minimize missing action while changing cards. I don't get the largest cards though just because I am paranoid that if something happens to it I'd lose everything. With my Nikon D100 I shoot 1 GB cards with 80x write speeds in Large/Fine JPG format and rotate between 3 cards. It's worked pretty well for me.


Jeff

 

[bicker]

The most significant impact of the brand for memory is the reliability of the memory -- whether it performs or fails -- not the quality when it does perform. Having said that, there isn't a wide variety with regard to reliability among the major brands. I'm not sure we could say the same thing with regard to "no-name" brands. In many cases, heavily-discounted non-name memory is actually lots of major-brand memory that failed qualification testing.

 

[Goofyish]

Fuji, Olympus cameras use the xD format cards, so you will probably only see Fuji or Olympus branded memory cards (certainly this is the case in the UK).
'xD' is short for 'Extreme Digital'.

Some Olympus xD cards has a 'Panarama function' that that allows the stitching together of numerous pictures to create a panorama effect. xD-Picture Cards from Olympus make it particularly easy to create such compositions when used in conjunction with a compatible Olympus digital camera. This function is not supported in Fuji cameras.

 

[JudithM]

I don't get the largest cards though just because I am paranoid that if something happens to it I'd lose everything. Jeff

This is simlar to what the folks at our local photography store told us when we first bought the D70.