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