GUYS
im heading of to russia in late september for my brown bear hunt and am getting a digital camera this week...CANNON S3IS i want to get a card which will hold a heap of photoes..can some ome point me in the right direction as to where to look as here in Australia the high capacity cards cost an arm and a leg

regards daniel

For starters shoot everything in JPG format (smaller file size, average detail) for all the 4x6 or 5x7 prints. For your trophy shots that you might want made in 8x10 or larger shoot those in RAW format (large file size, much better detail). Get two or three 512 cards. That way all your photos are not in one basket so to speak. Lastly I always edit my photos as I go deleting the ones that I don't like. I hope this is of some help. Or better yet take me with you & I will bring all my photo gear & shoot everything that way you will have one less thing to worry about!

Have a great trip!

Check ebay. There is a vendor there from your country selling 1 and 2 gig cards for very resonable prices
http://cgi.ebay.com/1GB-SanDisk-Compact-Flash-ULTRA-II-...QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I don't know if I agree that just because you shoot Jpeg's you will have smaller files. It is true that Jpeg is a compression algorithim program, but you can use it with some pretty large files. My Kodak will give me 8Meg Jpegs if I want them.

jpeg is small compared to RAW. I use a Canon Rebel XT & shoot in RAW only for the outstanding resolution.

It appears that .jpg files are the only choice for this camera, it's just a matter of what shooting mode you choose. http://www.steves-digicams.com/2006_reviews/s3is_pg3.html has some pretty good info on this camera, including the chart for the shooting modes.

If it was me, I'd shoot at the highest quality (2816 x 2112 pixels) in superfine mode - you can get 176 photos on a 512 MB card at that rate.

I also agree that several smaller cards are better than one large one, and to edit as you go along.

A year after your hunt the only thing besides the hide that you have will be the pictures - take plenty and don't skimp now on bringing enough memory cards with you. (You may even be able to borrow some from friends.)

Just a warning but apparently a hell of a lot of the high capacity cards being sold on Ebay are currently fakes...This particularly applies to SanDisk.

These cards seems to work, but run at much lower speeds than the genuine ones...

Try googling "Fake SanDisk" or similar for the full story....

I think I have been cheated
Now trying to get money back from PayPal after two months will be a waste of time.
Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks for that headsup Pete!

Don't believe everything you read. I went to Costco today to buy a new card and I also checked another Camera store. None of the packages in stock had a hologram sticker on the front but the contents were genuine and had serial numbers.
I think the lack of a serial number is a pretty sure sign it is fake. Anything else is iffy. None of the ones I purchased on EBAY had serial numbers on them.

A good place to buy cards in the US is newegg.com. I have bought items from this company probably 10 different times and had excellent service. The biggest drawback is they charge freight per item, not on the total purchase. If you're buying several items, be sure to make sure it's still a good deal. It usually is for me.

As already mentioned, the fakes are not always easy to spot from their appearances..

From what I have read, it appears that the fakes were confirmed by using software to interrogate the cards and retrieve the real makers name and card specs…BTW the fakes work, but were generally quite a bit slower than advertised and sometimes were a bit short on the memory too…Also there seemed to be reliability issues with some…

The conclusion was to buy cards from trusted main stream vendors…

If anyone is interested in cheap Compact Flash cards, I came across this site just recently:

http://www.memory-configurator.com/products/type/Flash_...pactFlash/index.html

The prices are in Euro’s which are roughly equal to $$

I’d not heard of Transcend before, but did a little research and they seem to be reasonably well thought of..There is some debate whether their x120 cards are actually any faster than their x80 cards, but they seem to hold up against the middle range of Scandisk cards, but at quite a saving…

I am going to try one of the 2gb CompactFlash cards ans see how it performs in my Canon…

The fakes do work. I tried all of them in my Canon 30D. They hold what they are supposed to but they operate slower. If I shoot using RAW and at burst speed it will take about 10 seconds more for the card to download the images. It is like we been told all along, we get what we paid for. I learned an expensive lesson and doubt I will ever purchase from EBAY again.

Back to RAW vrs JPEG. As I understand it the only advantage to shooting RAW is that you can better manipulate the photo later, if you have a program that will open a RAW file from your camera.

I use a D70 Nikon and I can shoot RAW, fine, normal and basic and RAW+JPEG. I have a CompactFlash 256MB card. In basic and small image size I get 950 frames, normal 528, fine 279; thats on small image. On large image basic is 279 and normal 144. fine is 73 and RAW is 23.

Now if I run large image and normal, that's 144 frames, actually 288 as I carry an extra card.

Maybe what you need is one of those little deals that plugs into your camera, is very small and holds about a ,,,,,,,bunch of photos. My cousins son carry's a deal with him to down load every day then later he feds it into his computer or can show then on the tevevision.