Anybody head or PQI brand media Cards?

[Paul]

I was paging through some new goody catalogs at work from my wholesalers and they had some 8 gig cf cards for less than $100. The Brand was PQI. never heard of them, have you?

I can't list acutal price due to dealer status with them but they were aroud $10/gig, I thought to be a fantastic price if they are of ok quailty. I also saw the new 12 gig scandisk III high speed for under 2 bills.

[brassman]

I have never heard of that brand of cards, howvere in response to your 8 and 12 gig cards, whats the point? I have a 500 gig hard drive and have over 1200-1300 pictures on it with my biggest setting 2000-2000 something pixels and it is only taking up about 5-6 gigs. too much risk involved to keep that many pictures on a memory card. thats just my opinion but if you want a card that you can keep a couple years worth of pictures on, thats your prerogative.

[Dbl]

Fairly new company that I think started out in computer memory. Don't know much about their flash memory. When it comes to memory I may be a bit picky and I only use one brand. Doesn't mean an off brand won't work just fine, but I normally have to produce shots and there are enough other things to worry about without thinking about that.

I am also not a huge fan of large cards. I don't like to put all of my eggs in one basket so to speak. If I am going to have a card issue I would rather not loose all of my shots that are on one card. I only use 2gig cards which will hold about 500 large jpegs or around 200 RAW shots. The 4gigs are about as large as I will probably go.

[mcary]

I don't have any experience or knowledge of that company. In response to brassman, I have an 8G card and in the right situations have filled it in less than an hour shooting RAW mode with my 40D. I agree it is unwise to leave images on cards for long periods of time, but some people do have situations that require those levels of short term storage capacity. I could imagine that with a body like the 1Ds Mark III and its 21MP sensor a person could fill up an 8 gig card pretty fast.

[Dbl]

I shoot relatively high volumes, sometimes as many as 4,000 shots in a day and the 2gig cards work well for me, actually aid in organization but I could see moving to 4gig cards in the future. I have too much invested in all my other cards at this point though when it comes time to replace I may go to 4's.

The other thing to consider is the speed of the cards, most camera's can't take advantage of the speed of the cards, your in camera buffer will only write so fast. The speed becomes more important when you look at transfer speeds off the card to a computer. The cards I use transfer at 40mb/sec though Sandisk just came out with a card that will transfer at 45mb/sec and have a greater temp range to them. $300 for a 8gig card

[Paul]

I have been pretty happy with my 3 scandisk cards. I have a 2gig and 2 gigs which usually give me more than enough shooting time in Raw. Everything is dumped everynight on to multiple hard drives. But the thought of having a extremly large card does add a bit of extra presence on a long day of shooting, but I can see everyones point about not wanting to keeps all ones eggs in ones basket. That is why I transfer after every time I shoot. Then format the card.

[Steve Foss]

I totally agree about the eggs in the basket deal. I now have two 4Gb cards, two 2Gb cards and two 1Gb cards. Unless I were to upgrade to the 1DsMk2 or Mk3, at 16.7 and 21 Mp respectively, I wouldn't buy a card bigger than 4Gb for exactly the reason Dan suggests. And while it might seem like swapping out four 2Gb cards as you fill them is a hassle compared to an 8Gb card, it's far less hassle than changing film all the time in the "old days" after just 36 frames.

That being said, there are a ton of different ways to look at most any photographic issue, and I may change my mind as I continue to work at it. Who knows?

I generally use Lexar or SanDisk, but have a 4Gb kingston ultimate card I really like and have recently picked up a Dane Electric 4Gb card that, while a bit slower than the others, has been functioning beautifully, even at below-zero temps.

When shooting a wedding or some other once-in-a-lifetime gig, I fill the four small cards before trotting out the 4Gb cards, in case one of those cards fails. Of course, 14Gb of cards is overkill for the weekend hobbyist, but anyone who shoots is well advised to get a second card (not to mention camera battery) when possible. Having that single backup can mean the difference between getting those great family moments or missing them.