Question about SD cards - General

Hey whats up, basically I am buying a Canon 550D during the week, and my friend said that if I got a camera that takes HDV tapes I could record gigs he organizes and he would pay me. I was wondering why I would need a camera with HDV tapes and he said because since the Canon 550D takes SD cards, he said that you can only record up to 4GBs on it in one go, even if you had a 16GB card, like it will record 4GB and then stop recording. I just want to ask you guys if it is true, as I have never heard of this happening before? Cheers.

Yes, it's due to the filesystem it uses or something, it only has support for files up to 4GB~ [editline]26th March 2011[/editline] Surely any good camera would be able to automatically just split the recording though? Don't know much about them so... look into it.

I did a Google search and didn't see anything on it, hopefully there is some way to hack it, I saw something about hacking cameras with a firmware update that added tons of new stuff

[QUOTE=Andy;28815912]Hey whats up, basically I am buying a Canon 550D during the week, and my friend said that if I got a camera that takes HDV tapes I could record gigs he organizes and he would pay me. I was wondering why I would need a camera with HDV tapes and he said because since the Canon 550D takes SD cards, he said that you can only record up to 4GBs on it in one go, even if you had a 16GB card, like it will record 4GB and then stop recording. I just want to ask you guys if it is true, as I have never heard of this happening before? Cheers.[/QUOTE] i've not heard of a camera cutting out midway through recording, provided there is sufficient space on the memory card. unless he's talking specifically about SD cards, which can only store up to 4GBs of data whereas [b]SDHC[/b] cards can store far more. i had a problem with my old compact that it wouldn't accept the SDHC but it was a pretty old model, i can't see you have any problems with the 550D.

Ah well are SDHC cards better or worse than SD cards? And do they cost much more?

SDHC is just SD High Capacity. as far as i know they perform pretty much exactly the same as SD(SC - Standard Capacity) cards, they can just store more, unlike the standard SD which cannot be larger than 4GB. they're only more expensive in terms of their capacity, the price difference between a 4GB SD and SDHC card would be minimal if even existant.

[img]http://eslgfx.net/gfx/logos/teams/4906000/4906193_medium.jpg[/img] They are deadly.

I just ordered my 550D :) Just need to decide on what card to buy! I heard that you usually want a class 6 or higher for the 550D, anybody known anywhere that would have them really cheap? Or the SDHC card? Somewhere that would deliver to Ireland!

[url]http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/default.php?cPath=777[/url] is always good. otherwise look on amazon, they are normally very reasonable

If you want cheap, go with something like Transcend. The cards are nice for the price. However don't expect it to have a very long life.

i wouldn't recommend anything that's not sandisk/kodak/kingston really. sandisk are probably the best, but you'll pay more. kingston are a bit cheaper but also a bit slower, but then i can only compare that on CF cards, don't know about SD/SDHC.

True true. If you have the money for a card like a Sandisk then by all means purchase one. However if you want a card that can perform just as well(but isn't necessarily reliable down the road) you can save a bit by going with a brand like Transcend.

Ah I see, I will have a look on the site anyway thanks a lot for all of the advice!