Photography Thailand Forum

[kinginexile]

How much are the MCs in Bangkok in specialized stores? I mean  the big ones, 4GB, 8GB.  As a comparison, there was one 8GB on Ecost.com a while ago TRANSCEND I believe, for about 160$. I passed over it, since I postponed buying the 5D, and having over 8GB worth already, but I like the idea of having a lot of memory for crazy days when you shot til' you drop, or simply forgetting to download one or the electricity is out (India, Burma...).

[CW Lawrence]

My gf recently bought a 4 gig Kingston for about $150 at one of the photo shops in MBK. Sounded like a reasonable price
till I just read your post Not a very fast card either, and when you start going that big, you need the card to be very fast.

[bjorn slis]

Are you satisfied with the kingston ?
U bought a Transcend a while ago and it crashed already 2 times (1gig) so now I use only my SanDisk cards, more expensive but very stable. I also have a 512 Dane Elec, but it gave me the same trouble as the Transcend.

[Marc Schultz]

I very recently bought a Kingston card at a place in Panthip Plaza called "Speed Computer", which is on the same floor as the food court. It is in the back corner on the right as you are approaching the back escalators. A fairly large shop with two shops connected.

They have by far the lowest prices I found. The card I bought was a 2GB SD card and I paid 1,070 Baht for it. I consider that a very good price.

They said it was only a regular speed Kingston card and not one of the high speed ones, but the speed only makes a difference anyway on transfer times  between your flash card and your computer. Camera write speeds are generally slower than any flash card so the speeds matter little in that respect.

To me the difference between the "high" speed and "slow" speed cards is listening to one more song while the files copy over. I did a speed test though with this card using a USB 2 card reader and had the card fully loaded up with RAW files. It transferred all the RAW files to my computer in 11 minutes. For 2GB worth of data, I don't consider that very slow.

[kinginexile]

I have 2 Transcends, 2 and 4GB, no problem so far, but a toshiba card had a few "corrupted" shots (I'll use it for landscapes, with mulitple shots for each pix/exposure). I am taking the computer with me, so no need for RAW+JPEG and eating up space on the cards, as I will be able to view RAWs on the screen.

[Marc Schultz]

In general, I don't think people need to be too brand conscious because basically the flash memory chips inside these memory cards, despite their being close to 50 brands of cards now, are all made by 2-3 manufactures, mainly Korean companies like Samsung and others.

And like any other technology, all of these things fail from time to time. I am yet to find any sort of computer or digital storage technology that is infailable. Given that, I don't think one can say there is a brand of memory cards that never fails. Even Sandisk, which many people praise as being the most reliable, do fail. In fact, the only card I ever had fail on me was made by Sandisk.

At the moment I am employing a mix of brands, Kingston, Transcend and Sandisk, and I am happy to say I have not had any of them fail on me in about the last 5 years. But if they do, there are also programs out there which can sometimes recover pictures from a damaged card.

In my opinion, get the biggest sized card for the lowest price you can and don't worry too much about speed, brand, or failures as none of these issues seem to have any consistency from my experience one way or the other.

If I need to buy another memory card I will simply buy another one of those 2GB Kingston "slow speed" SD cards for 1,070 Baht or a 2GB CF card for 1,490 Baht from Speed Computer (www.speedcomputer.co.th) as it is the lowest price I have seen at this point in time on cards in Thailand.

If you are in the states you can buy a 4GB CF Transcend card on the internet here for about US$50:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820160137

Hope that helps.

[kinginexile]

4GB CF Transcend card on the internet here for about US$50:
---------------------------------------------------------

Holy cow, that's low! I know this outfit, got my portable storage from them, but regret I did not get that kind of deal on my 4GB! I also regret it's too close to departure, i would have gladly bought a couple for some of you guys in BKK, if you wished, but that 2GB panthip deal, this is pretty much the same ratio, in any case, about 30$ at today's change and no shipping!