Media cards for C5060

[getwet2]

Hi everyone,

Got my eye on the C5060 and it's housing as a first real underwater set up, with lots of help from everyone here on the board by the way but I've got a question about the media cards. There are a few types out there, xd, cf, smart media etc. I did a search of media cards on the board but didn't turn up much.

Could anyone please explain the differences with these cards and how interchangeable are they with each other and what the pros or cons are with any of them?

 

[justleesa]

First off it is a size difference. The xd is about the size of a stamp and is supposed to be very durible. Right now availible up to 512MB
http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/cpg_xd.asp
The compact flash cards are a bit bigger and are availible in different reading and writing speeds. If I remember correctly the biggest size that the 5050 (and maybe 5060 too) can handle is a 2.2gig (correct me if I'm wrong).
You can either use the XD & CF or the CF and Smart media combinations

I ran a search of the ScubaBoard and found a great posting from Scubatooth that you might want to read:
http://www.scubaboard.com/showpost.php?p=450280&postcount=6

Hope this helps you a bit.

 

[getwet2]

Thanks a lot for the help justleesa the thread was very good.

It looks like I need to practice my searching!!

 

[justleesa]

any time getwet2

 

[Kim]

I believe at the moment Compact flash cards are the fastest. How fast they are is also different from one manufacturer to another.
Check this link for some explanations and comparisons:
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/mediacompare/
In principle the faster the card - the quicker you can take another picture!

 

[ReyeR]

The C5060 can accept xD, CF (Type I and II) and IBM Microdrive. The C5060 uses FAT32 as the file system so it is not limited to the 2.2 GB that FAT16 is.
The xD was jointly developed by Olympus and Fuji. It is tiny (in physical size) and the current largest memory capacity available is 512MB. If you want to enable the panorama mode on your camera you need to use an Olympus brand xD card. Currently there are few devices supporting xD cards.

CF cards are the most common media around. Current popular memory capacities are 512MB, 1GB or 2GB. They are fast, robust and economical in terms of $/MB. Type I and II differ only in thickness (3.3 and 5mm respectively).

IBM Microdrives will fit into the same slot as the CF card. It is a miniature hard drive. Because it contains moving parts it may be more prone to shocks, heat build-up and power consuption than solid state memory like CF cards.

Smartmedia cards were used in the earlier Olympus models like the C4040. The largest capacity available is 128MB and they're slowly being phased out.

The speed at which a photo is written or read from a memory cards not only depend on the file size and the memory card speed but also the read/write device itself (in this case your camera). I've generally found on my C5050 that a fast CF card, like a Transcend 45x or Sandisk Ultra II outperforms the xD card, but the bandwidth is no where near the specs on paper.

 

[getwet2]

Thanks Kimleece and ReyeR, lots of info to read now.