SD card speeds

[Kills On Site]

So looking to get my sister a camera for Christmas, a Canon SD1200 IS to be exact, and am curious about what sort of memory card to get her for it. On one hand this Kingston 4 GB SDHC looks nice, 4 GB certainly is a lot and would most likely exceed her needs as she is fairly quick about getting photos off her camera. Or would Kingston 2 GB SD Elite Pro 50x be a better choice because it claims to be faster. I have googled various performance ratings and am somewhat confused. The 4GB is a Class 4, which apparently is typically faster than 4 MB/sec. So I am curious if the different speeds actually mean anything for use in a camera or are just gimmicky.

[Foo]

The SD speeds do matter if you're a camera buff but it's not a big deal for entry and mid-level kit. The difference she'll notice is the time between taking one picture and being able to take a second, but on a 10Mpixel camera that doesn't write raw.... it's going to be insignificant.

Also, a 512Mb or 1Gb card is plenty sufficient unless she's on a prolonged safari or similar where she can't offload the pics. If she's got something like that coming up, she'll be more concerned about taking enough batteries to be able to fill up the card.

tl;dr any card will do.

[o'dium]

At 28ish meg an uncompressed image, 512 would fill up pretty quick, no?

[Foo]

Doesn't appear to support uncompressed.

At the supported res the upper end of file sizes is going to be 2.7Mb. You'd fit around 180 images on a 512Mb SD, plenty for a full day and probably a week of beginner/casual shooting.

[Kills On Site]

Well we, my mother and I, were at Best Buy today and the camera was the same price as Newegg so we just went ahead and picked it up. Got a PNY 4GB SDHC Class 4 with it, which was only $10 so hopefully it will do pretty well.

[obsidian]

Yeah, wouldn't worry about memory speeds on a point and shoot. More significant differences if on a high end SLR shooting RAW.

If your sister is hot, tell her to take a few photos for us.

[GONNAFISTYA]

If your sister is hot, tell her to take a few photos for us.