[drabina]

I need to up the firmware to 1.02 but i didn't know about the card readers needed for the hcsd cards. I download every night to my computer so all I would loose is that days pictures.

If you check bensbargains.net web site, you will find a $6 deal on two SDHC compatible card readers. I have one of those readers (non-SDHC but looks the same) and it is working just fine over USB 2.0. I think I got it over 2 years ago so it survived longer than one of my SD cards (the one that split apart).

[greenhorne]

Jim, When and on what line are you doing your Alaska cruise? My wife and I will be on the Inside Passage cruise on the Star Princess on 4-11 May.

Mike
We will be on the Star Princes Cruse line but our cruse in in the last of August to the first week in September. Sounds like it should be a good trip hope to get some great pictures.

[Zilla]

What is the "best" SD card for the K100/10D's? To me "best" = fast and reliable so I don't necessarily mean pure technical specs, but also experience. I work in the memory industry and can honestly say that NOT all flash memory is created equal.

[Outlaw]

What is the "best" SD card for the K100/10D's? To me "best" = fast and reliable so I don't necessarily mean pure technical specs, but also experience. I work in the memory industry and can honestly say that NOT all flash memory is created equal.

Interesting - who/which brand would you recommend or is that question stretching the bounds of professional ettiqutte?

Even a glimmer in the right direction would help out. Thanks.

[noblepa]

I got my K10D last september. At that time, 8GB cards were becoming readily available. The manual for the K10D only refers to 4GB cards, so I sent an email to Pentax, asking them if the K10D could handle the 8GB cards and the inevitable 16GB and 32GB cards to come.

Their response was that, when the manual was printed, there were no cards larger than 4GB to test with, but that there was no reason that the camera would not accept the larger cards.

I can't attest to that from personal experience, since my largest card is 4GB. I think I would agree with those who recommend getting several smaller (2 or 4GB) cards, rather than one huge one. Memory cards do occasionally go bad. Its better to lose a couple of hundred shots on a small card than a thousand on a large card. SD cards, even with the plastic cases, are pretty small and easy to carry around, so that isn't really an issue, either.

Paul Noble

[Noisychip]

Maximum SD card size depends on the file system of the card. With the FAT16 filesystem, 2GB is the maximum. FAT16 is from the very early Windows versions when nobody thought about the requirement to have 16GB space on the size of a stamp

SDHC cards use FAT32, which allows 2TB (2000 GB) theoretically, if I remember right. So if SDHC is supported, FAT32 is supported, and so any size should work.

Anyway, I prefer taking multiple smaller cards, especially when going into the 'wild'. Just think of accidentially dropping your card which can easily happen.

If there is water, snow, dust on the ground, you might wish you would have dropped just 1GB instead of 16GB

Think of losing the card, accidentially stepping upon it, breaking it ... That's why I go for smaller cards.

[Zilla]

Interesting - who/which brand would you recommend or is that question stretching the bounds of professional ettiqutte?

Even a glimmer in the right direction would help out. Thanks.

Memories, like anything, have different "grade" levels. So even "dice" (raw, unpackaged chips) from the same wafer will perform differently under the same set of tests, mainly because of physics. So a die on one corner of the wafer may be faster than a die on another corner on the same wafer, for example, and hence will be placed in a higher-grade bin.

"Brands" buy from different memory manufacturers - Qimonda, Samsung, Hinix, Mocron to name a few - and in the memory industry, that's usually the house with the cheapest price. When they do, they also buy the different grade levels to service a certain market. For example, server-grade memory is understandingly more expensive than commodity-grade (home PC). Dell is one of the PC vendors that buys the higher-grade memory products, and my 1996 Dell PC shows it (now retired).

So the old adage "You get what you pay for" may be true when considering flash cards for the camera - the more expensive ones are probably better the the cheaper ones. So a a pricier 4GB BrandA may indeed be better that a "much" less pricey 4GB BrandB, However, I can't really tell which would be better between 2 comparably-priced brands, with comparable specs.

Hence I asked for advice based on experience, not just specs.

[Zilla]

If there is water, snow, dust on the ground, you might wish you would have dropped just 1GB instead of 16GB

Think of losing the card, accidentially stepping upon it, breaking it ... That's why I go for smaller cards.

To me the 4GB is the happy medium between convenience and safety.

[bychan]

Hi
Ihave a k100d camera and looking through the manual there is no indication of the max size of an sd card. I am going on an alaska cruse and would like to get an 16gb card will this large card work.
thanks Jim

I have just purchesed a K100D Super, plus an integral 4gb SDHC card. After formatting the card in camera, it only displays 999 avaiable images.

Presumably the latest firmware is only for the K100D, as I cannot get this to work either.

[simons-photography]

for the price of the 16 GB card (+ the risk of loosing soo many images if something happens) you can get a backup drive to dump the photos on they cost around 30 £ + the price of a 2.5" HDD of your choice

the K10D does use FAT32 file system