What are the differences between all of these? e.g. SD memory card, multimedia card, smartmedia card, xD picturecard, compact flash card.

Thanks

HG

Shape.

The only real difference is the shape of them.

Which of those would you recommend?

the one that fits the camera

however if buying a camara and you have no other devices that use memory cards then I would look at SD cards as they seem the most popular atm

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...d.php?t=428388

Darren

Well thats what I meant :P thanks

What do you need it for?

Going by the title of the thread, my guess would be a (prospective) digital camera.

Ok, I'll be more precise.

What camera do you want it for?

Yes, you buy the card that works with your device, you don't get a choice in this sense. MMC and SD cards have same form factor (as do their mini versions) and many slots that accept one, accept the other.

I would say SD/MMC and CompactFlash are the two most popular formats and hence the cheapest. Apart from Sony devices which all use various incarnations of the memory stick.

SD is the most common format for compact cameras while Compact Flash is present on most SLR and high end cameras. Both are well priced and if you look around you can get nice fast write speeds.

Like t'others have said.. what do you want to do with your camera?

The differences are mostly price & form factor. Check one of the big camera or online shops & compare price per MB for the different types. If you get it wrong, the cost of cards can make a 'cheap' camera a lot more expensive.

But the camera's kinda key.. eg the more megapixels on the camera, the bigger the picture size & the fewer pics you can get per card.

If you take lots of pics (like on holidays), that means lots of cards, or bigger cards.. or taking a laptop/image filer. My D2X shooting RAW+jpg's gives me 36 shots on a 1MB card.. which cost more than film

I like CF, mainly cos it's big, cheap & harder to lose. Check somewhere like Jessops..

SD costs around £50/MB & maxes at 2GB
CF costs around £40/MB & maxes at 8GB

Sony's sticks are just nasty & expensive.. and CF & SD has a ton of adaptors for plugging cards into things to view & print.

For as start, I assume you mean £50 and £40 per GB, not MB.

And .... I dunno where you do your shopping, but £50 for a 1gb SD card ?!?!? You must be kidding .... tons of them available for £15 and under.

From what I can see, CF is a quid or three more expensive, but there isn't much in it.

XD is about twice the price of SD, same for for DuoPro (for Sony devices).

fji cams all use sd and the cards can be more expensive than others but if you dont buy brand the price drops dramatically

if by fij you mean fujitsu, i have seen them use xD rather than SD and xD cards certainly are more expensive and less common in card readers and things though they do have a small (and thus fiddly) form factor. My 1GB SD card was bought last year April for £32 inc. vat, so for about £13-21 now sounds about right.

Oops, yep..


Check prices for the bigger cards. 1GB are cheap, 2/4/8GB are those sorts of prices. With the pixel count going up on cameras, big cards are handy & 1GB cards just don't hold that much.


Depends what you want to do.. If its an 8mp+ camera, CF's cheaper if you want to take lots of pictures without carrying around lots of cards or swapping out to a disk, and they're faster than the other cards.. Also cheaper as they're more open standard & less licencing costs for the makers.


Yup.. not sure what the point of XD is, they're slower than SD, more expensive & pretty much limited to Fuji & Olympus. There's a handy comparison here-

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

But a lot still comes down to what camera it's for.

That goes for Fuji camera's too - they use xD - although the S9500 also takes CF/Microdrive

Sorry when I said fujitsu I meant fuji as in fujifilm cameras.
Fujitsu were the company that merged with siemens.