Buying more photo stuff

I was looking today for a spare camera battery, SD card, and a new multi card reader (my old one can't read SDHC cards) for when we go on holiday to Scotland in a couple of weeks.

For memory cards I opted for a Dane-elec Pro-line 16GB SDHC card, for £14. An 8GB card was £9 and a 32GB card was £21. So the 32GB card is cheapest per GB, but I didn't think I'd ever make use of the full 32GB, and if the card got corrupted or lost, loosing 32GB of photos would be quite painful.

On the holiday I will probably shoot using my existing Sandisk 4GB card first, then switch to the new 16GB card when the 4GB card is full. I'll be taking a laptop and hard drives for copying / backing up the photos each day, so that will give me 20GB worth of space each day, rather than for the whole trip.

Before deciding on the Dane-elec branded card, I did some research and found this handy guide to branded SD card speeds compared. I also checked reviews, 7dayshop Professional branded SD cards didn't seem to be very reliable, but the Dane-elec cards have a good rep as far as I could see.

Likewise, many of the cheap card readers seemed to be unreliable. There were plenty of reviews on one of the ones I looked at on Amazon saying that they had to contact the seller, who sent them out another one because the first one they had was faulty. So I thought it was better to pay a bit more and went with a Kingston branded one.

For the camera battery, there are a few unofficial batteries listed on Amazon. The official battery was listed at £20, and has a capacity of 1080mAh. There is also an energizer branded battery listed at about £13, also with a capacity of 1080mAh. Then there is a Neweer (Chinese) branded battery for about £4, which, according to the back of the battery in the product photo, has a capacity of 2000mAh.

So I went for that one, it actually ended up about £5 including postage as it was from an Amazon seller rather than Amazon themselves. Will be interesting to see what it's like, unless it blows up the camera.

In the afternoon today I also played on the two player latest downloadable levels for Portal 2 with L. In the evening I did some sculpey painting / plasticine model making.