On Jul 11, 2005, at 3:57 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
- 9 larger contacts contacts are a lot more reliable than 50 smaller
ones
- 9 larger soldering tabs on a PCB are a lot more reliable than 50
much
smaller ones, this is true both in the camera and in the card
- contact surface on an SD card is easier to clean
- it's a more difficult to damage a camera by mishandling a SD card
- water doesn't go inside SD cards
- SD is smaller so less prone to suffer damage from twisting
And SD cards are far more prone to damage through natural static
discharge due
to their exposed electrical contacts.
I've been working with Memory Stick, Compact Flash and Secure Digital
storage cards for a long time and not yet seen a single incidence of
static discharge damage to any of them. It's certainly a possibility,
but its significance is incidental at best.
I have seen several cameras require repair due to bent pins in the
internal CF card socket, as well as a few cameras/readers with jammed
cards that needed a service trip to dislodge them. I've not seen this
happen with any Memory Stick or SD cameras/devices yet.
Given that the pricing for comparable performance and capacity CF and
SD is so close now, a preference for one or the other is more a
matter of how large a capacity you must have ... there are larger CF
and microdrive card capacities available than SD cards ... and what
you already have a lot of. There seem to be more new cameras/PDAs/
cell phones/etc adopting SD than CF at this point.
Memory cards are just a commodity nowadays, with fast 1G cards
approaching $70 and even lower, so it's really not that big a deal
which ones a camera uses if you don't already have a bunch of any
given type.
Godfrey
