On Friday 24 September 2004 21:48, Robert Paulsen wrote:

Which is more reliable and which is faster (given the same capacity, e.g. 2GB) -- Compact Flash memory or Micro Drive?

On reliability I can only go by my experience, but here goes. IBM 1GB CF MicroDrive. Started out OK, then I realised that there is like a 3 second delay between powering on the camera, and the microdrive being ready. A little annoying as you tend to miss the "moment". Then it started acting up. The damn thing wouldn't initialise, and sometimes I could power cycle the camera ten times before it'd work. Transcend 1GB CF Bought when the microdrive drove me too far up the wall. Has never failed to initialise. The speed issue is dependant on the camera to a large degree, and what you mean by speed. One of my problems with using the microdrive, is I couldn't take a shot until the microdrive initialised. 3 seconds (yawn). With the Transcend, I depressed the shutter release, and my camera would come out of standby, initialise the card, and take the first shot practically instantly. The cheaper compact cameras have a lot of shutter lag, meaning you press the button and a second later it takes the shot. An SLR used correctly shoots the instant you press that release. As to how fast they are at transferring data, Prosumer and above have buffers that can hold a number of shots waiting to be transferred, and so that gets around the speed of the card, provided you get the shot, and don't mind waiting for them to clear to the card. I'm not too sure whether lower end cameras have buffers and continuous shots. To put this into a real world figure. I have a Fuji S2 Pro. It'll take 7 shots at ~2/s before you have to allow a frame to be written to the card, allowing you to take another. If you shoot continuously and fill the buffer, expect to wait for approx 40 seconds for the whole buffer to empty with either card. This is with 7x12MB raw files. My stuff is getting on for 2 years old though. Personally I'll never buy a microdrive again purely on the grounds of the reliability issues I encountered. One final thing to consider is that microdrives are slightly thicker cards, and are not physically compatible with some cameras. HTH -- Steve Boddy

On Friday 24 September 2004 13:48, Robert Paulsen wrote:

Which is more reliable and which is faster (given the same capacity, e.g. 2GB) -- Compact Flash memory or Micro Drive?

Hi Robert- Either one will work for you. Now if you like to throw your CF cards around, go with the solid states as opposed to the microdrives. Being a professional photographer, my take might be slightly different than your average computer geek. I used microdrives successfully for 2 1/2 years before they were stolen with my camera bag last month. NEVER had any problems with them. I picked up my 2 microdrives in June 2002 as the price point for that 2GB of storage was considerably cheaper on the side of the microdrives. Again, NEVER had any problems with them. Last time I looked (monday), my camera has nearly 78,000 actuations on it. A good majority of those were shot with the microdrives. Heck, I didn't pick up my first solid state CF card until about 1 1/2 years ago and shot EVERYTHING on the microdrives prior to that. I now shoot with 2 1GB and 4 512MB Transcend CF cards and am about to pick up 2 more 1GB cards. You're really better off with lots of "smaller" cards. Better to spread things out a bit. As far as speed goes....I'm voting that the solid state CF cards are going to be quicker, but there's a saturation point that you're really not going to notice. The only time I noticed lag with the 1GB microdrives was when I was shooting large bursts of images at high ISO. Good luck, brian -- Brian Jackson Photo Sports ~ Editorial ~ People ~ Travel ~ Events http://www.BrianJacksonPhoto.com 650-218-5082