This is great news for anyone interested in taking high quality snaps, the only downside to this is that these higher resolution images take up much more space than lower resolution shots. For example an image taken with a 5 megapixel camera using it's top image quality setting will weigh in at around 2Mb, whereas a 2-megapixel camera would produce a file of roughly 1Mb at its highest quality setting.

It's unlikely that the memory card that came with your camera has a capacity larger than 32Mb. With a file size of 2Mb per photo this would mean your card would be full after just 16 photos a have been taken. As a result investing in a larger capacity memory card is essential for almost all users.

This poses a question though, with a vast selection of memory cards available for each format with offerings from a host of different manufacturers, which card do you buy? While the format of the memory card you choose will be dictated by your camera, the brand you buy is up to you.

The card manufacturer however is a different matter; you may think that by buying a card manufactured by the company that produced your phone you would be getting a better quality product. This isn't necessarily the case however and cards produced by camera manufacturers can over twice as expensive as third party cards from manufacturers such as Kingston, Transcend and San Disk.

While it can be tempting to entrust the storage of your digital images to a known brand this may not necessarily be the best deal and it isn't guaranteed to give a better performance.

On the other hand, if you do opt for a cheaper card how do you choose between these third-party brands? While the capacity of different brands of, for example, 1Gb cards will obviously be exactly the same across the board do more expensive branded cards offer better performance and quality when it comes to reading and writing files?

This could potentially have an effect on how quickly you can transfer digital images from a camera's memory card to a your PC. There is now also a new breed of memory card available that claims to offer faster reading and writing speeds. Do these 'faster' cards give measurably better performance to make it worth paying more for them?

Independent tests have indicated that there is no performance advantage to be gained by buying big brand memory cards over cards from third party suppliers such as Crucial, Transcend and SanDisk.

In some cases the data transfer speeds of the third-party cards were actually faster than the camera brand cards, although there was no clear winner over a range of different cards. Additionally, our tests also indicated that there was actually very little additional performance provided by the 'faster' cards now available, which may cost up to £10 more than a standard speed card of the same size.

It seems third-party storage media will serve your needs just as well as memory cards branded with the name of your camera's manufacturer, providing you take good care of them.

Our advice therefore is to shop around online and on the high street to ensure you get the best deal, and you should base any choice of memory card on price rather than on the basis of brand.


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For more information please contact:
Clove Technology
Clove Technology
PO BOX 4367
Bournemouth
BH3 7YS
UK
Phone: +44 (0)1202 552936
Fax: +44 (0)1202 552937
sales@clove.co.uk
www.clove.co.uk