Shopping Conundrum: Sub-Featherweight Micro SD Card or 11+lbs of CF Cards?

The first time I bought memory was on the eve of my first trip to China in January of 2001. I’d never been to Asia and figured, “hey, Shanghai is a place I’ve heard of, so off I went.

My 2.1 megapixel Canon Digital Elph which was a killer deal at the time at $430. A truly exceptional camera. My prints from this and other trips were eventually shown in a gallery in Kirkland, Washington, and over the course of a year I even sold about two. Not a profitable hobby.

Even then I knew then that memory was too expensive, but it was that or rely on my memory of what all the Russian prostitutes at the Hard Rock Cafe looked like. Looking back, maybe I didn’t need the camera after all.

I bought a single 128mb Compact Flash card for $120 plus tax. That’s a per-gigabyte cost of $1,055. Way I saw it, it was still cheaper than film with exceptional quality, even then. At the end of each day I’d go back to my hotel and delete the less-than-awesome pictures and have more room to shoot the next day.

This week I bought a 64Gb Micro SD card for $18.99 with no tax and no shipping cost. That’s a per-gig cost of $0.30 cents. You tell me, would you rather pay $1,055 per gig of memory, or thirty-cents… That’s what I thought, you’re an idiot. The correct answer was the smaller number. So sorry.

So because I love numbers and I thought it would be interesting (boy was I wrong,) I did some research and ran the math. You know, for what us geeks like to call “fun.”

My 64Gb Micro SD was $18.99 (on Amazon) and is the size of my pinky nail.

If I had bought 64gb of Compact Flash cards in 2001, it would have cost $67,528 and consumed a space just larger than a 6x6x6-inch cube. It’s roughly the size of 54 Rubik’s Cubes.

64 gigs of 2001 Compact Flash cards would weigh 11 & 1/2 pounds. 64 gigs of Micro SD card weighs .4 grams. For perspective, a feather is only .56 grams. So it’s lighter than a feather.

If my current 16 MegaPixel camera only had 128 megabytes of storage, I could only take about 30-40 pictures. I could fit about 32,000 such pictures on my new Micro SD card.

On my first three China tours, I’d shoot modestly during the day in what is today considered very low resolution (1600×1200). There was no video on point-shoot-and-be-awesome cameras back then, so it was nothing but images. In the end I’d come home with 70-80 pictures and still think I got a great deal.

Later trips I brought three memory cards, and by the time we were doing tours into Canada, Puerto Rico and the various west coast cities, memory had caught up with practicality. That is, assuming, you didn’t mind practically spending a hundred or two to get more than enough to last a month.

So don’t think twice about memory, guys. It’s as cheap as water now. It used to be something only people with means could acquire, now it’s something you could lose in your couch cushions without regret. And not just because it’s that small, which it is, but also because it’s that cheap… like your mom.

Author: Dexter Sinistri

Dexter Sinistri is a famously centrist writer who has worked as a Hollywood correspondent for a number of leading publications since 2005. Though once a photographer, Mr. Sinistri struck out as a writer on all things celebrity, and he likes to consider himself a tremendous asset to Glossy News, though by most accounts, he has fallen somewhat short of this effort.