A lot has changed since my first experiences using digital cameras back in the naughties: sensor size, image processing speed, feature set, build quality, weight, cost and of course, the capacity, speed and cost of the all-important memory cards.
Like many emerging technologies, digital memory cards first appeared in several different formats (physical shapes), with each participating company vying to establish its standard as 'the benchmark' - in roughly the same manner that audio cassettes battled it out with 8-track cartridges and VHS tapes took on the Betamax video format.
At the outset (depending on the camera model) we could choose between: SmartMedia, Compact Flash (CF), Sony Memory Sticks, Fuji FujiFilm XD Picture Cards, Multimedia Memory Cards (MMC), Smart Digital memory cards (SD) and Mini SD Memory cards. Quite a choice. Of course not all memory cards fitted all cameras - that was where the war for market dominance was being fought and as a result of market competition or technological restrictions many of these early card types were forced into early retirement and discontinued.
SmartMedia cards: Produced by Toshiba - these wafer thin cards were slated as being 'the' replacement to the original 1.4mb floppy disk. Initially the SmartMedia card was called the Solid State Floppy Disk Card or SSFDC (catchy name eh?). This format was supported by Olympus, Agfa and Fuji, but as camera resolutions continued to increase at an alarmingly fast rate, SmartMedia's low maximum capacity, topping out at 128Mb, eventually forced it to be abandoned for higher capacity technology such as the SD format.
Even though Sony Memory Sticks only worked in Sony equipment these blue sticks could be used in all of Sony's camera range, plus its extensive range of video cameras and game devices. Sony clung on to this format till 2010, releasing several faster and higher capacity cards (i.e. Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Pro Duo, before it gave up the race and moved over to the more commonly used SD card format.
FujiFilm XD Picture cards were a Fuji-only design that went the same way as Toshiba's SmartMedia and Sony's Memory Sticks. Though its highest capacity had reached a respectable 2Gb, the company eventually gave it away in favour of the ever-popular Secure Digital format (SD).
The Compact Flash or CF card is one of the 'heavy lifters' of the digital camera memory market. The format has been available since 1994 and continues to be a feature of high end pro cameras, albeit in a slightly different form factors - which allow for greater capacity and significantly improved read/write speeds. At about the same time that the CF card was released there was the CF Microdrive - essentially a tiny spinning hard drive the same width and height as a regular CF card, but slightly thicker. Microdrives were produced by a range of companies including: IBM, Hitachi, Seagate, Sony, Cornice and Western Digital. Its main drawback was that its technology couldn't keep up with solid state CF cards - both in terms of read/write speeds and maximum capacities. And because Microdrives had moving parts, just like a regular computer's SATA drive, they could not handle rough treatment. Solid state cards have no moving parts and are therefore very robust. On several occasions I've accidentally left a card in a shirt pocket. They go through the wash without any damage! By 2006 solid state cards, such as the XQD, CF Express and SD form factor cards, eventually took over.
Enter Secure Digital (SD) Cards: The humble SD card is the camera memory race champion - for several practical reasons. SD cards are small, very robust and continue to develop staggering data capacities. My first SD cards were less than a gigabyte in capacity and as my camera had a low resolution sensor, it seemed as though I could capture as many shots as I needed on the one card. Of course that changed with the next camera, and the next camera...
SD card technology has been reborn several times since 2000 with the SDHC (high capacity) format, the SDXC format and, announced in 2019, the SDUC, 'Ultra Capacity' format, which will support capacities up to a staggering 128Tb!
Also the mobile phone market demanded physically smaller cards. This resulted in the amazingly compact Mini and Micro SD cards that are now an industry standard for mobile phones and cameras. And of course, these tine solid state cards are perfect for the huge popularity of action cameras - like the GoPro, among many others
Card speed or an Arms Race?
Aside from the desire for a memory card that can hold all your files, another driving requirement is for a card that can record those files as fast as the camera can shoot them. Funny thing is that cards today can record files far faster than most cameras can shoot.
One of my very first cameras was an Agfa ePhoto 1280 featuring 0.8 of a megapixel resolution. Wow. I don't even think it had a continuous shooting mode - so the SmartMedia card could save the images as fast as I could press the shutter. More or less. I think my next 'proper' digital camera was an Olympus E10 that had a 4Mp sensor and in continuous shooting mode could manage three frames a second up to only four shots. Useless for any kind of fast action where a fast sequential shooting mode is most needed. Pretty soon the highly competitive memory card market became awash with advertising superlatives. It was no longer OK just to have a 'regular' card. Early cards were rated with read/write speeds of 15Mb/s. As most JPEGs were significantly smaller than 15Mp, recording files was relatively easy. Almost overnight 30Mb/s cards were released, and then, as the tech giants began to get fully into gear, it was game on. My next camera purchase was a chunky digital SLR - a Nikon D100. Six megapixels of serious shooting power. At that time I recall spending around $300 for a Lexar 8X 128Mb card. Ouch!
I think the least confusing representation of card speed (which includes read and write speed) is, as just mentioned, written as megabytes per second (Mb/s) but as the memory card market heated up, marketing these cards became very competitive, and more confusing. We saw names such as Ultra 1 and Ultra II cards, then came even faster Extreme and Extreme Pro cards. The grander the superlative, the faster the card performed.
Speed Class
Memory cards also feature a Class denomination. This was a valid attempt to standardise the performance of the card, regardless of manufacturer. It began with Class 2 cards, then slowly worked its way up to Class 10 cards. This simply indicated the card's minimum record speed. There are four classes C2, C4, C6 and C10, having minimum write speeds of 2Mb/s, 4Mb/s, 6Mb/s and 10Mb/s. It's a standard that's now pretty much obsolete in my opinion because almost every card currently available is more than fast enough for all but the most extreme of shooting requirements. Video Speed Class While the generic Class rating applied to both video and still images, we now see a dedicated video speed class where V6 is roughly equivalent to the Class 6 speed just mentioned. This video class now goes as high as V90 (90Mb/s, relevant if you are an avid 4K or 8K video shooter
Ultra High Speed Class
The UHS standard refers to the bus speed - how fast the card can 'talk' to the device it's being used with. There's a UHS 1 and a UHS 3 standard. Just more confusion for most, I think, so, let's get back to using megabytes per second and have done with it.
Jump 20 years and I find that my Olympus OM1 can shoot up to 120 frames a second for an extended period of time - depending on whether it's set to RAW or JPEG files and the speed of the memory card of course. Its 20Mp resolution is nowhere near the current best in class (45Mp+) but it can produce an 80Mp file from a static subject. So this camera needs high capacity and fast memory cards. I paired it with a 128Gb Lexar card with a max write speed of 250Mb/s, not the fastest card on the market, but it handles 120fps well. If I was shooting 8K video, I'd need a faster card, but I don't, so it's not an issue!
Most consumers don't understand what these 'standards' mean and those that do might agree with me that, for the most part, they only apply if the camera cannot keep up with your shot rate. If your job is photography then it certainly pays to have the fastest gear your budget can take, but for the rest of us, it's not that relevant. After 25 years of development, everything is more or less fast enough.
Downloading Blues
One thing I might mention is that downloading files from card to computer is almost as important as recording those files onto the card. In the early days of digital photography you might shoot 100, 200 or more frames in a day, especially if you dabbled in weddings, sport, or perhaps wildlife.
I remember the frustration of the slow download using a card reader to transfer files to a computer. Sometimes that process took hours for each card. And the slightest bump to a connecting cable often meant you had to reboot the laptop and start the download process again.
In 2010 there were several products on the market aimed directly at the prolific shooter - enabling you to download files from multiple cards at the same time. It still took a very long time but at least you could download images from all the cards in one operation. On safari in Africa in 2010 my download regime was to set the file transfer process going at the end of each day - then having a shower, then drinks, then dinner, and then checking if the files had finished downloading. Sometimes they had finished but on particularly wildlife rich days it might have taken even longer. It was a frustrating process because while you were transferring images you could not view them on the screen for fear of interrupting the process. With the development of USB 3.0, USB 4.0 and Apple's Thunderbolt ports, data transfer speeds are incredibly fast - so using a device like Lexar's Workflow kit (pictured) allows you to download from up to four cards at one time.
In those early days my go-to desktop PC was a 66MHz PowerMac 6100 - state of the art in those days, with a 350Mb hard drive but only 8Gb of RAM. No USB, just a SCSI port offering a data transfer rate of 5Mb/s. Macs these days feature terabyte hard drives as standard, and processors (CPU) are measured in Gigahertz, and lightening fast USB or ultra high speed Thunderbolt ports offering data transfer speeds of up to 20Gbps.
Powering Up
Of course, once digital cameras came of age it wasn't just memory cards that required significant improvement. Most early digital cameras were powered with the humble, inexpensive, and ever-so-available AA batteries. These can be bought anywhere, but it wasn't long before newer cameras needed a more powerful and reliable power source that could go the distance, powering the camera's autofocus system, its shutter, the LCD screen, its operating system and the built-in flash. Because of those early power-hungry cameras I always used to advise students not to spend too long checking their images on the LCD screen because that would drain the batteries very quickly, especially if the battery symbol began blinking red! In those early days it paid to recharge your batteries at every opportunity. The picture here was taken in an African bush camp where the generator was only fired up for a couple of hours a day so everyone in the group queued up to get the valuable juice. One of the most useful of all gadgets to take on such a trip was a power board!
Early digital cameras required a lot of power and although the ubiquitous AA battery was a perfect stop gap before more powerful batteries could be developed, they never lasted very long. However their advantage was that they were cheap and could be bought anywhere in the world. Next in development came the rechargeable battery. The first ones available to digital photographers were nickel cadmium cells (NiCads). Though these were quite good, they never lasted as long as a good set of AA Duracells - also NiCads had a memory issue. If you recharged a set of NiCads before they were fully exhausted you'd never be able to get them up to 100%. Most of us used them because they were still cheaper than using regular AA cells. I had dozens of them - quite a few just failed while others lost their ability to fully charge. Nickel cadmium is also not very good for the environment - they were replaced by the more efficient nickel-metal hydride cells (NiMh). These rechargeables were more reliable, had a better power output and did not have the memory issue that plagued NiCads.
Lithium camera batteries appeared in the mid-nineties and while they certainly seemed to provide the much needed power for digital cameras, the earlier products didn't hold their charge very long - either the battery would only provide power for a few hundred frames - while some just failed.
When travelling for more than a day you certainly needed to pack several batteries, plus their associated a/c cable and charger. We still do this, however, at the outset, battery charging was quite a slow process - the nature of the beast at the time.
A gripe many photographers have is the cost of the batteries - a genuine Canon LP-E6 battery, one of the most commonly used in semi- and pro Canon DSLRs as well as a range of film and video gear (i.e. field monitors) would cost $100, sometimes more, depending where you bought it from. For years prices for these batteries rarely went lower than $70 - however soon enough other companies began producing third party batteries costing around $50, or less. At the time I didn't want to spend hundreds on backup batteries so picked up ten generic Canon LP-E6 batteries online for $20 each. That was a great price - and while the batteries never lasted as long as the genuine product, they did quite nicely as backups. After a few years of service they began to die one by one - I still have a couple of those cheapies left but then another problem arose - what to do with the dead batteries?
Thankfully many councils these days offer a free battery recycling service .
Despite the huge advances in lithium battery technology, the cost of new technology batteries remains high - a replacement LP-E6NH (for a Canon R-Series mirrorless camera) will cost $190, a second battery for an Olympus OM1 (Olympus BLX-1) is priced at $150. So although these products provide good longevity and shots per charge, they remain very expensive accessories and don't look as though they are likely to come down in price much in the near future!
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