Just wondering if theres any noticeable difference in your photograph depending on what brand card you use?  Like the difference in film.  I recently bought a new card for my Olympus 5050. 512Mb.  The first place I looked wanted $65.00 Olympus brand. The next place had Fujifilm brand for $39.00.  I finally bought a Olympus Scandisk for $37.00 0n sale.  This is a XD card. Any thoughts?

I have not heard of a difference in the image. Write speeds differ, and no-name brands are more prone to failure. Anyone, please correct me if I am wrong here. In your case, buying the non-oly brand means you can't use the in-camera panorama feature. Otherwise it should be the same.

Yeah I'm finding out about speed. The smartcard I first used in it was a lot faster then the larger  XD.   I know they are rated by speed. But didn't know about the panorama not working, thanks for that bit of info.

Images are stored on the memory card as a stream of binary values (zeros and ones). Basically the only thing that can happen to alter the image that has been stored is either one or more of these bits become corrupted during or after the writing process or one or more of the memory storage locations become faulty. Usually either of these conditions will result in an error while trying to view or retrieve the image or images whose information is stored in the corrupt or faulty memory locations.

The bottom line is that either your images are exactly as they were stored or there is some missing or corrupt information affecting specific area(s) of the image. It is possible although unlikely that the corruption could be in the area of the image file that contains header information such as EXIF data, colour pallatte information, etc (depending on file format such as TIFF, JPEG, etc) in which case the image could appear radically different with all sorts of strange artifacts and/or colour corruption.

Hope this helps. :lol:

Wayne

Having had friends who worked in the technology manufacturing business and knowing just how many things like car parts, writable CD's and memory cards are the same product whether branded with a Blue Chip company logo or unbranded for another company to market, I honestly have never bought a top-brand card etc.  Ironically, I have only ever had one memory card fail on me - the original 16mb Fuji one that came with my camera........

The only thing I watch out for is the manufacturer of a brand etc.  eg. some brands of CD are manufacturered by one company for 3 of the top companies - I'll use any of theirs, no matter what branding is on them.  Another manufacturer is used by others, and I've had problems.... so I guess it'll be the same for cards too.

(I was lucky enough a few years back to meet a University Professor/Developer who had a 128mg card that they'd prototyped in his pocket.... I didn't believe him at the time that it could hold so much...... boy, was I ever wrong!! lol)

(",)

Thanks for all the info.  And ReBorne, your right about just a few companies making everything. And since Oylmpus and Fuji are, I believe the only camera that use the XD card and Olympus was the innovator I'll shop around for sales on it. All thought this camera can use 4 different card types. I've only tried the smartcard and XD. The smart card is getting really hard to find in my neck of the woods.  Had to find it on line and it was expensive.  I use it in my Oly4000.

Yeah, smartcards in the states are like gold dust - actually gold is easier to find. lol.

Luckily you can still grab them in the UK, but compared to US prices they would come over as being a bit pricey...... OMG - I've just checked one of our top retailers and they don't have smartcards listed any more...... there's a sign to get hold of a few while we still have a chance......

(",)