Welcome back! It is nice to see you back again.

Another quirk of the dSLR involves the storage methods you choose and use. You may have more options and a few more pitfalls than your point-and-shoot toting friends. This section will reveal a few of them. First, most point-and-shoot and EVF cameras can use just a single type of storage, whether it’s CompactFlash, SD card, xD card, or MemoryStick. However, many digital SLRs have multiple memory card slots. Some cameras can accept both a CompactFlash card as well as an SD Mirrors and focus screens:

Handle with caution

You won’t find many tips for cleaning your dSLR’s mirror or focus screens, other than to use a blast of air. That’s because a bit of dust on either one of them is unlikely to affect the operation of your camera, and both are easily scratched. If you become obsessed over mirror or screen dust that you can’t easily remove, consider sending the camera back to the vendor for cleaning. Wiping with lens paper, swabs, or cleaning liquids is likely to do more harm than good. card. Olympus and Fuji, because the xD cards they are promoting have not caught on as quickly as they would have liked, are forced to support CompactFlash media as well in their higherend cameras. I don’t expect to see digital SLRs that accept three or more card formats in the near future, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more of them appear that accept two types, or which have multiple slots for a pair of the same kind of media.

Key Considerations – Here are some of the things to consider when choosing digital storage for your dSLR:

■ Size. CompactFlash are slightly larger than the alternative media, but probably more rugged, too. The larger size isn’t particularly more difficult to tote around (compared to the volume consumed by a brick of film), and not quite as easy to lose. The smallest card in wide use, the xD card, is less than an inch square, and I’ve managed to mislay mine more than once.

■ Capacity. Don’t expect one format or another to retain a capacity advantage for very long, but at the time I write this, CompactFlash cards that hold 8G or more are available (if expensive), while SD and xD cards trail a bit behind. Sony MemorySticks bring up the rear, although MemoryStick Pro cards with MagicGate can top 4G. If maximum capacity is important to you, keep track of the latest developments among the vendors, realizing that the top capacity cards are likely to be the most expensive.

■ Form factor. As I’ve mentioned several times before, CompactFlash cards are available in both Type I and Type II configurations. Type II cards are thicker, and won’t fit in older digital cameras that have only the thinner, Type I slot. That may mean that you can use only older, lower-capacity CompactFlash cards. Fortunately, SanDisk has introduced a 4G memory card in the original Type I size. If you’re using a digital SLR that has an original Type I slot, make sure your higher capacity card is of this variety.

■ Cost. CompactFlash-sized mini hard drives tend to be the least expensive option for storage over 1GB, often half as much as a solid-state CompactFlash card of the same capacity. If you’re looking for a 4GB or larger card, a mini hard drive may be your best choice from a cost standpoint, although they are a bit less rugged than their solid-state counterparts. SD cards recently have been priced at about 10 percent more than CompactFlash cards of the same size, with xD cards at an extra 10 percent premium over that. Larger capacity Sony MemoryStick Pro cards can be significantly more expensive than any of these.

■ Eggs in one basket syndrome. Opting for large memory cards over several smaller ones does more than increase your costs on a per-megabyte basis (a 4G card is often more expensive than 4 cards of 1G capacity). You’re also increasing your exposure to loss of images if you lose a card or the media becomes unreadable. Some photographers like to pop in a single card and then shoot all day without the need to switch to a different card. Others prefer to swap out cards at intervals, and keep the exposed memory extra safe. (If all your eggs are in one basket, watch that basket very carefully!)

Using multiple cards is a good way to segregate your images by topic or location. If you’re on vacation in Europe, you can use a new card for each city (just as you might shoot one or two rolls of film in each location). Or, photograph cathedrals on one card, castles on a second, landscapes on a third, and native crafts on a fourth.

I tend to prefer using a handful of 1G cards over working with one or more large memory cards. With a 6-megapixel dSLR, I can shoot 150 or more photos in RAW format per 1G card (a lot more than I got with 36-exposure rolls of film), and don’t need to swap media very often except when I’m shooting sports. As dSLR resolution increases, the size of a “small” memory card will creep upwards. With my next upgrade to a 12-megapixel model, I’ll probably consider 2G cards the smallest practical size.

■ Speed. When choosing a card, evaluate your needs and the write speed of the card you’re considering. As I mentioned in Chapter 2 and will note again in Chapter 8, for most kinds of photography the write speed of the card has little effect on your picture taking. An exception might be if you’re shooting sports sequences, or if you’re shooting RAW or TIFF files and your camera is particularly slow in saving these files. (I recently tested a camera that took as long as 30 seconds to write a TIFF file to the card.) You’ll pay more for the higher-speed cards, perhaps with no discernable benefit. You might be happier with three 1G cards having a 20X write speed than one or two 80X or faster high-speed cards with performance that you rarely require.