I'm planning to switch from film to an EOS 10d, and I was wondering how people on the list with digital camera bodies store their images. I mainly photograph natural subjects, typically while hiking or on road trips. And I think I'll mainly be shooting RAW images, to maximize image quality. So I'll need a lot of portable storage (carrying a laptop computer is not going to work for me). The best price per megabyte seems to be for the 1GB IBM Microdrive. I'm also looking at the Delkin eFilm PicturePad, which contains a 40GB hard drive. So I could periodically transfer my images from the Microdrive to the 40GB hard drive, and have just a single Microdrive.
However, I was reading a page on dpreview.com which says that the 10d is rather slow at saving images. The article therefore recommends buying the fastest CF card available (and I think flash memory cards are faster than Microdrives). But this does not make sense to me. If the 10d is inherently slow to transfer data to storage, then there is no point in buying the fastest memory card available, because the camera (not the memory) will be the performance bottleneck.
So, my questions are: is the IBM Microdrive a good match for the 10d? And is anyone using the PicturePad to archive data while travelling with their 10d?
Gerry
Personally, I would stay away from the microdrive. Basically, you have a small hard drive and given some not-so-rough usage, it can be prone to failure.
I use a Sandisk 1GB standard card, with a couple of 256MB cards in reserve. Shooting RAW, with low-quality, small JPGs, I can get about 150 shots on the 1GB. That can pretty much carry me for a day, or just slightly less. Speed is not an issue when shooting nature shots, so transfer speed doesn't concern me. If I was shooting action shots, then I would get higher speed cards. However, tests show that anything faster than about 12x is not going to help due to the bus speed in the camera.
Once I am done shooting for the day, I then transfer my files to a laptop that I carry (if on an overnight trip) and use the CE-RW burner to burn copies to CDROM. That gives me redundancy if the hard drive in the laptop crashes. You can also get portable CD burners, but I use mapping software that needs the computer for route finding, so I just take the laptop and live with the weight.
Mitch
-- Mitchell S. Baltuch Principal MountainStorm Technologies [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mountainstorm.com
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