How much memory is suitable for raw

[RyanEustace]

I plan on starting to shoot raw more often and have been researching memory cards.

Obviously i know 32gb is better than 8gb , but its also alot more money , how much memory is it ideal to have if going on an average day shooting (using mainly raw ) and haven't got the oppourtunity to sort through them.

I have a canon 50d , any one out there who uses a 50d and shoots mainly raw i could do with your input.

Thanks alot

[Duke Leto]

how mant shots do you take now? multiply that by the size of the RAW images on a 50D (check with Canon) or guestimate at 20Mb, or @ 50 per Gb. If you take 200 shots normally a 4Gb would suffice.

I don't have any cards over 4Gb cos if I lost an 8Gb or above that would be a massive amount of images to loose, on my Nikon D300 it would be over 390 per 8Gb. So I have a batch of 4 and 2's

[hollis_f]

Unlike Steve, I prefer to have a single card that's big enough to take a whole day's shooting. That's mainly because I know I'm not very organised and there's a good chance I'll lose a card if I have to keep swapping them (especially if it's in the middle of something exciting). With a single card the only way I can lose it is to lose the camera - which even I'd find hard to do. Of course, I do have some extra cards in the bag - just in case. But they never get used.

Another reason for buying big is that you get more bytes per pound. So a single 8GB card is normally cheaper than two 4GB cards.

[Rob Chace]

I also favour more smaller cards for the same reason Steve mentions. I usually bank on a max of 200 images per card, in my case on my D2x, 4GB.
Regards
Rob

[Duke Leto]

Sorry Frank, by lose I mean the card fails, rather than misplacing them, which obviously is another concern.

[RyanEustace]

So your saying usually 8Gb is sufficient

[Watts]

So your saying usually 8Gb is sufficient

I use 8 Gb cards with my D300. There is, of course, a risk of card failure, though often recovery software will get you out of the hole. But in my experience I am more likely to lose shots whilst changing cards or losing a card in the heat of the moment by dropping it - and if you're working in a dark hide unless you hear it fall you won't see it when you look around before you leave.

Whatever might be your normal day's shooting, there may come a time when you just shoot so many you don't want to risk running out of memory. On the boat to the Farnes, for instance, when you're shooting like mad attempting to get just the right flight shot as that bird takes off from the sea or the gannets fly just overhead, knowing that most will be a complete waste of time not least because the motion of the boat. And the last thing I want to do with spray flying about is to start changing cards.

Is 8Gb sufficient? For a full day I would never go out with just one card, but most often I wouldn't need to change cards in the field.

Bill

[HokkaidoStu]

I have a 7D and use a fast 16GB card, it gives me about 600 RAW shots, you'd get a few more than that on your 50D. I have a couple of slower 8GB cards that I used on my old 400D that I have in my camera bag in the unlikely event my main card gets full or (more unlikely) fails.

Today I took the chance of testing the 7D's rapid 8 FPS bursts and before I knew it I had over 500 images of flying Kittiwakes. I almost needed to reach for one of the spares.........

If you don't take a lot of bursts you can pick up 16GB 133X Transcend CF cards for around $40 or $50, SanDisk are probably slightly more. Cards are not expensive anymore. When I got my 400D in early 2007 the cheapest CF card in the store was a 4GB Buffalo card that cost about $170!!!!!!! You can get two 32GB cards for the same price now........

I'd get a 16GB as my main card if I were you and keep whatever you're using now as a spare.

[hollis_f]

Sorry Frank, by lose I mean the card fails, rather than misplacing them, which obviously is another concern.

Ah, that's something I don't really consider a risk. After more than 10 years of using CF cards I've never, ever, had one die in a camera (had one expire in a PDA - but that was my idiot fault). After writing several hundred thousand images with no problems it's not something I'm going to worry about to the extent of restricting the way I'd prefer to work.

[Duke Leto]

If I'm really honest I can't remember the last time I needed to change a card in a normal day I find 4Gb more than suitable and out of the 196 images it stores in RAW I doubt more than 20% are worth keeping and out of that only a handful worth publishing / printing.

I suppose if you take hundreds of images to get the one you need then buy as big as you want, its probably down to the individuals photography habits n styles

[RyanEustace]

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9672


The SanDisk Extreme IV 8GB seems very reasonable at about £40-£50 i shall probably go for a couple of them.

[iveljay]

Whats the betting in two years time we'll be asking the same question about much bigger cards - or have we stopped the mad race to more pixels?

I must admit that for a long time critical stuff was limited to 2GB cards as that was the maximum capacity of the second card in the camera I could back up to. Now I have stadardised on 8GB and pray!

[Fozzybear]

The current move is to 18, 22 and even 25 megapixels so the race hasn't ended.

[RyanEustace]

You can get 32gb cards the next will be 64's