Mighty, Mighty Memory

One of the problems I’ve faced with my Canon 10D over the years is how much space RAW files take up. You see, when I bought this camera (back in the day), I purchased a 1GB Compact Flash card with it (which was $250, if I’m not mistaken).

Unfortunately, if I switched the camera to RAW mode, I only got 155 images with this card. That may sound like a lot, but on a full day in Yellowstone, it really isn’t.

So why RAW? After all, I can fit 383 high-quality JPEGs on the very same card (almost 2.5x as many as RAW), which is a lot more reasonable for an outing.

Well, without getting ridiculously technical, JPEG is a lossy compression, meaning the camera throws out all the data is captured when it first took the picture. The image on the card is all that’s left. You’re committed. As strange as it sounds, RAW means the camera made no final decisions about the image, which makes editing A LOT easier. So, you can change things like exposure and white balance without trouble, unlike forcing adjustments on a JPEG in Photoshop (which is kind of kludgey and unreliable).

Now that Flash memory is so cheap, I decided to check into what it would cost to buy a second card. Of course, I ran into those ultra sexy SDHC cards that go up to 8GB (and soon to 16GB), but I have an older (c. 2004) camera which only takes Compact Flash (Type I and Type II). What to do? Especially since Type II Compact Flash cards seem to only reach 6GB as a maximum.

Bless those crazy engineers who decided this whole CF and SDHC thing is an injustice — they came up with an adapter! You see, those SDHC cards are much, much smaller than CF cards, and so it’s easy to fit one inside of the other.

After determining an adapter would work for the Canon 10D, I ordered that and an 8GB SDHC card (class 6, for extra speed). Once inserted in the camera, I was floored by how many photos could be stored on the new card compared to the old one:

Compact Flash 1GB
RAW – 155 images
JPEG(L) – 383 images
JPEG(H) – 749 images

SDHC 8GB
RAW – 1,240 images
JPEG(L) 3,064 images
JPEG(H) 5,992 images

(where L means “Low Compression” and H means “High Compression” — that is to say, L equals higher quality, H equals lower).

Outstanding.

So, this most recent trip to Yellowstone (July 27-29) featured me shooting exclusively (for the first time) in RAW. I’ll be sure to post those pictures soon.

-Michael Eric Brown

~ by Michael on 1 July 2008.