memory cards

[isebones]

I'm getting my son a Nikon d40 dslr for xmas. I noticed the sd memory cards are quite different in price. What is the advantage of getting an 'extreme'
card over a 'ultra' card. Its something about the speed, right? Does it really make that much of a difference and why?

[Prospero]

With my D50 I use three different types of SD cards, each with different speeds. In using the camera I find that the performence of the camera does not depend on the card I am using. From what I have heard, the speed with which the camera writes to the SD cards, is slower than the maximum speed of the slowest SD cards available. Hence, even with the slowest cards you will get maximum performance out of the camera.

However, you will notice a difference when transferring pictures to your computer. With High Speed SD cards this will go a lot faster than with the slower ones.

[LR Max]

I echo what was said before.

I'd recommend a 2 gig card. You'll never complain about having too much memory, but you'll complain about not having enough memory.

[eduardofrances]

Well one thing that determines the price is if it is accelerated or not, SLR cameras take advantage of this feature and reading and writing performance is better with accelerated cards.

The second issue is the quality of cards, I would recommend using, sandisk, lexar or trascend this cards are very good and will not die on you, I had a Kingston SD and CF cards that died on the 3rd download, when I exchanged it the next ones had troubles and corrupted data... so cheapo cards aren't a wise investment, your memories are valuable things so in order to preserve them get brands that will not give you trouble.

You can go with an non accelerated sandisk, lexar or trascend card and you will be ok, but if you need more speed think about the accelerated ones :)

Ultra and Extreme sandisk cards are accelerated cards, being the extreme the most "pro" of their line.

[tcadwall]

I concur with the first two replies. I am currently using 3 different CF cards from 2 different manufacturers. I prefer Sandisk. I like the Extreme series the most, but in real life shooting I haven't noticed a difference in camera speed performance with the different cards. The slowest I have used is the Sandisk Ultra II. There is a quite noticeable difference when downloading files from card to computer, and to me it is important to be able to download fast.

Scientifically I have not tested the camera speed, but since I do shoot in burst mode quite often, I think I would have noticed any noteworthy difference.

[wh0128]

Slowest card I've ever shot with is a Sandisk Ultra II as well and it didn't give me any trouble. At Bestbuy I saw a 2gb Ultra II for 39.99$. Though I would rather have 2 1gb cards rather than just 1 2gb card, for the reason if one of them gets corrupted then you have another one to rely on, though this doesn't happen alot. If compact is your thing, then the 2gb would be fine. If you want to get the fastest Sandisk Extreme III 2gb card, it will burn a whole in your pocket. So you might have to just browse the internet for cards that are less expensive, but have good name brands such as Lexar and Sandisk that have a huge variety of cards and different sizes.