Memory card recommendation?

[Brian2828]

I just bought a Panasonic FZ5 and plan to purchase a 512 or 1 gig memory card. Is there a particular card that people recommend? Does the speed of the card matter in terms of the camera performance?

Thanks

[Norm in Fujino]

I just bought a Panasonic FZ5 and plan to purchase a 512 or 1 gig memory card. Is there a particular card that people recommend? Does the speed of the card matter in terms of the camera performance?


The card speed absolutely matters IMHO. When researching my recent dSLR purchase, I bought two Lexar 40x 512MP CF cards (and bought a third 1GB later). After buying my camera, I sent in a freebee application and the camera manufacturer sent me a 256MB CF card as a present.
That's great, except the free card is a standard 1x CF type and takes at least twice as long to record after each shot. Since I shoot RAW (and on occasion, RAW+JPEG), that's a lot of time waiting. So the point is, if you are a very slow and thoughtful shooter, maybe getting x1 cards doesn't matter. But if you ever need to make additional quick shots, having the ability to write quickly to the card is essential. The next card I buy will be an 80x. (Lexar or Sandisk, most likely).

[Jredtugboat]

I just bought a Panasonic FZ5 and plan to purchase a 512 or 1 gig memory card. Is there a particular card that people recommend? Does the speed of the card matter in terms of the camera performance?

Thanks

I recommend cards by Lexar all the time. My daily card, for example, is a Lexar 80x 512MB card. The '80x' refers to the data transfer speed, ie., 80 times above the baseline, which, if memory serves, is 1,500 kbps/second.

Speed matters, as Norm points out, because when you take a picture it has to be sent to the card. How fast you can shoot depends, in part, on how quickly your camera can send the data from the sensor and processor to the card. A fast card is absolutely essential.

Will you go wrong if you buy a 40x card? Probably not. I don't know the transfer/write speed of your particular camera; you should check it out to be sure.

As far as brands go, I use only name brands...Lexar, Sandisk, Kodak and Viking are the brands are the ones I go with. This is not to say that off-brand cards are going to ruin your life, it's just that I tend to stick with brand names on account of their being a known quantity.

A good place to shop for memory cards is Tigerdirect.com. I've been mail ordering from them for years and have never had a problem.

Hope this helps.

Yours,

Julian

[juliezim]

"ultra fast" memory ...supposedly a good idea, but I read that it makes no difference for some specific camera models.

[Norm in Fujino]

"ultra fast" memory ...supposedly a good idea, but I read that it makes no difference for some specific camera models.

As Julian noted above, it depends on whether your specific camera has the circuitry to handle the speed of the card. Some do, some don't.