[psoo]

All photographers aim to get pin sharp photos when they want them. To this end they buy the best cameras and lenses that they can afford. I have, maybe a naive question, about whether the memory cards used in DSLR's have any effect on image quality. I have been using a Sandisk 64 MP card for about 7-8 years and it has never let me down functionally. However, will a new memory card give me "sharper" photos? What say ye learned Pentaxians?

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Last edited by psoo; 04-24-2019 at 03:40 PM. Reason: typo

[BigMackCam]

All photographers aim to get pin sharp photos when they want them. To this end they buy the best cameras and lenses that they can afford. I have, maybe a naive question, about whether the memory cards used in DSLR's have any effect on image quality. I have using a Sandisk 64 MP card for about 7-8 years and it has never let me down functionally. However, will a new memory card give me "sharper" photos? What say ye learned Pentaxians?

No. Different cards will offer different read / write speeds, and different levels of reliability (though all of the major manufacturers are excellent - just be sure to buy genuine cards). But they have no impact on image quality, since the data is stored digitally. So as long as it can be written and read, it will be the same regardless of the card used

[aslyfox]

I agree but these articles might be helpful as well:

The Benefits of Fast SD Cards - Tutorial Videos | PentaxForums.com

Comprehensive SD Card Guide for Photographers - Articles and Tips | PentaxForums.com

[BigMackCam]

I agree but these articles might be helpful as well:

The Benefits of Fast SD Cards - Tutorial Videos | PentaxForums.com

Comprehensive SD Card Guide for Photographers - Articles and Tips | PentaxForums.com

To avoid confusion, though, these articles have nothing to do with the quality of images as queried by the OP. They're useful regarding compatibility, performance, quality and warnings about fake cards... but the fact remains, SD cards do not have an impact on image quality. So long as the digital information can be successfully written to, and read from, the card without error, the data - and, hence, image quality - will be the same, as is the nature of digital storage...

[aslyfox]

To avoid confusion, though, these articles have nothing to do with the quality of images as queried by the OP. They're useful regarding compatibility, performance, quality and warnings about fake cards... but the fact remains, SD cards do not have an impact on image quality. So long as the digital information can be successfully written to, and read from, the card without error, the data - and, hence, image quality - will be the same, as is the nature of digital storage...

sorry

you are correct, I thought I had made that plain

if you think the post is too confusing, please remove it

[BigMackCam]

sorry

you are correct, I thought I had made that plain

if you think the post is too confusing, please remove it

No, the articles are useful, Allen - I just wanted to be absolutely clear about the image quality aspect

[stevebrot]

A data bit is a data bit. There is no gradation in quality. As long as all are present and accounted for, all cards are the same. If all are not present, the file will be unreadable by any valid readers.

However, will a new memory card give me "sharper" photos?

NO


Steve

[clickclick]

And just in case you were wondering, Sandisk is a very good quality card, so continue to use them without worries. And this is only about reliability of reads/writes on the card. As already said, 0's and 1's are the same.

[Dartmoor Dave]

I'm just glad that this is a forum for photographers rather than hi-fi nuts. My dealings in classical vinyl bring me into contact with audiophiles quite often, and here's some of the things that many of those guys genuinely believe:

A £500 high-end USB cable gives you better bass and more detailed treble. So presumably if I connect my camera to my computer with one of those I'll also get better shadows and highlights too? From purely digital data? I think not.

A £500 high-end mains cable will also make your music sound better, by working some sort of voodoo magic on the electricity after it has travelled hundreds of miles down the power lines to your house. In which case, I guess I should be charging my camera's batteries with an adapter using hand-drawn silver cable with gold-plated contacts. Yeah, right.

Freezing CDs makes them sound better. Yep, just transfer your photos onto a CD, leave them in the freezer overnight, and tomorrow your colours will have much more punch and pop.

And of course, the one thing above all that will make your DSLR give more analogue-like results is valves. Amplifying that signal off the sensor with transistors is bound to give your photos a harsher, more clinical look. What you really need for warmer, more pictorial shots is a 20kg DSLR built with triodes and a hefty output transformer. You could haul the battery along in a wheelbarrow, as long as you connect it to the camera with a cable made from oxygen-free high-purity copper.

Ah. . . it felt good to get that off my chest.

[Paul the Sunman]

I'm just glad that this is a forum for photographers rather than hi-fi nuts. My dealings in classical vinyl bring me into contact with audiophiles quite often, and here's some of the things that many of those guys genuinely believe

Wow, you hang out with some weird people! Of course, it's not like that on PF.

[Ontarian50]

I'm just glad that this is a forum for photographers rather than hi-fi nuts. My dealings in classical vinyl bring me into contact with audiophiles quite often, and here's some of the things that many of those guys genuinely believe:

A £500 high-end mains cable will also make your music sound better, by working some sort of voodoo magic on the electricity after it has travelled hundreds of miles down the power lines to your house. In which case, I guess I should be charging my camera's batteries with an adapter using hand-drawn silver cable with gold-plated contacts. Yeah, right.

Ah. . . it felt good to get that off my chest.

Yes, audiophilia nervosa is a very real phenomenon, in no small part because the psychology of hearing isn't fully understood. You plunk down a lot of cash on something that looks impressive, is well made, and has some plausible sounding explanation of why it makes your hi fi sound way better ... and you want to believe in it (in part because you don't want to waste money) and so your ears do indeed hear something different, maybe better, than you had before.

And yet, that darn thick and expensive cable that connects my CD player to the wall does indeed have a very real, not subtle effect on my sound system. I've yet to see a voodoo-free explanation of why it is a better upgrade to my CD player than any other hi fi tweak out there. I've played a track for an unsuspecting listener, swapped the cables, and played it again. They ask "what did you do?" after noticing a clear upgrade to the sound. The fancy cable has no effect on my amplifier, I might point out. It only seems to be an upgrade to a digital device .... which has led me to wonder if indeed there are ways to tweak digital devices such as scanners or monitors via audiophile methods. I have to say, I've never tried them

But yes, bits are bits, and bytes are bytes, no matter how they're stored or transported. So long as your memory card can keep up with your camera, and is reliable (stay away from no-name house-brand cards, and stuff bought cause it was "great deal") you should be okay.

What the audiophiles have taught us, however, is that while digital data is robust and can be copied perfectly again and again, its conversion back to the analog realm is a delicate process, and can be affected by any number of small things (or big thick cables).

[bkpix]

The audiophile world is perhaps related to the cult of Limited lenses -- of which I am a card-carrying member

[Dartmoor Dave]

Yes, audiophilia nervosa is a very real phenomenon, in no small part because the psychology of hearing isn't fully understood. You plunk down a lot of cash on something that looks impressive, is well made, and has some plausible sounding explanation of why it makes your hi fi sound way better ... and you want to believe in it (in part because you don't want to waste money) and so your ears do indeed hear something different, maybe better, than you had before.

Yes indeed. I learnt a lesson about the psychology of my own hearing a long time ago when I spent a whole evening setting up a fancy new REL subwoofer. I spent hours trying out different locations for it, adjusting the crossover frequency and slope, hearing big obvious differences down in the deep bass with every adjustment I made. Then, when I'd finally got it all set up just right, I discovered that I'd connected it to the tape-in rather than pre-out on my amp and I hadn't actually been a hearing a thing from the new sub all evening. So nowadays I use a calibrated mic and spectrum analyser for that sort of thing instead.

And funnily enough, I've sometimes found myself seeing imaginary changes while processing photos in Photoshop too. More than once I've been playing around with things like saturation and contrast and would swear that I'd seen real changes in the image, but then discovered that I actually had the wrong layer selected and I wasn't really seeing any difference at all. The human mind is a funny old thing.

[photoptimist]

All digital storage devices have a bit error rate with high quality devices having lower error rate.

If images were stored in the simplest possible way, those device-level errors would sprinkle very rare bits of colored sparks or darkness amongst the pixels. It would not affect sharpness, just sprinkle a little dust.

But -- and here's the important part -- images are not stored in the simplest possible way. They are compressed to remove redundant data with each bit of data possibly providing information about an entire group of pixels, an entire row, or all the pixels after a certain pixel. The result is that a single bad bit can really corrupt a chunk of an image. It can even make the file unreadable.

Thus, the quality of the SD card affects the chance of getting any usable image off the card rather than merely lowering the quality of the images.

[BigDave]

Probably the best analogy to photography here is speakers and monitors. The digital data from your camera/memory card WILL be influenced greatly by the monitor you use, just as the sound will be influence by the speaker. The cable to the monitor, much less so, but I can see a cable making a difference with an analog speaker (are there digital speakers yet???). Resistance, capacitance and rejection of electrical noise (shielding) can influence the sound. How much? The sound is in the ear of the listener!
Regards,