Jens Bladt mused: > > Why would I want to use a Microdrive? Because high-capacity CF cards are still quite expensive, and you only get about 70 RAW files per GB of storage.
Prices are dropping; in about a year I'll probably replace my drives with higher-capacity CF cards. But at present CF is around $100 per GB, while MicroDrives are at around half that price. The ratio stays the same, while prices continue to plummet - a year ago prices were twice what they are now. Even only buying 2GB of capacity a year ago I saved myself $400 by buying MicroDrives. Why wouldn't I want to save $400? I don't regularly shoot under extreme conditions of either temperature or altitude. Nor do I subject my camera to mechanical shocks - anything severe enough to trouble a MicroDrive can do nasty things to camera alignment, too. And while a MicroDrive *is* slower than a CF card, and takes more out of the batteries, neither has proved to be a problem in the field; I've never yet had to change betteries more than once per session (even without the battery grip, and changing the batteries at the first convenient moment after the camera drops permanently below the full charge indicator). Nor has the write speed been much of an issue; the internal buffer size is the big problem here.
