Recently I was tasked with acquiring two 8gb high speed compact flash cards for a Canon 5D Mark II. This DSLR high capacity memory card ranges from a low of less than 30 dollars on amazon.com
to about 60 bucks at a retail brick and mortar store such as staples. Here’s a snapshot of the current prices for this 8 GB compactflash card from Sandisk with 30mb/s (200x) speed:

• office depot: 55
• staples: 60
• costco: 36
• walmart: 35
• bestbuy: n/a

Unfortunately we did not have any time to wait for an order from the internet although it would have been the cheapest route. Since these memory cards were needed immediately, we first went to Costco since the closest walmart is 15 miles away. No luck here since Costco was out of stock at the locations that were closest to us.

It would have cost over 12 dollars for gas and bridge fare to get to Walmart, but it would have saved almost 30 bucks net. Instead of scooting over to Walmart and wasting an hour of time, we instead chose to examine the price matching policies of the local stores that carried the same product. To our delight, OfficeDepot had this card in stock and they claim to offer price matching on their site. We went in to the store and asked them to price match with Costco or Walmart. They stated that they would not price match with Costco, but they would check with Walmart. They would not have been able to check costco’s website since they don’t list the Compact Flash card online. It is a good thing that the Sandisk SDCFH-008G 8GB memory card is a product that can easily be verified for price at the walmart.com website. After about 10 minutes with the manager on duty at Office Depot, we were able to save $40 bucks on the cost of the compact flash cards without ever stepping foot into a Wal Mart!

PRICE MATCH TO SAVE MONEY!
Not every store manager on duty will price match since it is really left to their discretion. They usually also must verify if the item is in stock, and some store managers may not price match simply because the nearest Walmart is 15 miles away. If one store doesn’t do it for you, it’s easy to go on to the next one to get the discount that you deserve for doing your homework and researching before making a purchase on a product that stores sell at wildly diverse prices.

This story comes to an end with the conclusion that 8gb compact flash cards are really not big enough to satisfy the high megapixel, memory hungry, Canon 5D. 16gb cards are next since the prices for 32gb cards remain exorbitant.

Side Story: Picking the right Digital Camera Memory card for You
Digital Cameras have become very powerful and affordable compared to the quality of pictures that can be attained with Digital SLRs. Newer, faster cameras that are capable of capturing many megapixels (some DSLR cameras can capture over 20 megapixels!) require higher capacity memory cards with speeds that the camera can utilize. We intend to use our camera mainly for stills as opposed to video so card speed is not really an issue. 30mb/s (200x) has been fine in the Canon 5D mark ii. Will there be a noticeable difference with faster cards? Maybe. But the cost of the higher speed cards just don’t justify the speed. 60mb/s sandisk extreme iii cards sell for about double the cost of the 30mb/s 200x cards. Take a step up to the next level at 90mb/s and the cost goes up to double of what the 60mb/s cards were! Totally insane. Photographers that are using their DSLR cameras for video may want these faster speed cards to ensure that they are getting the best quality video, but we are sticking with the 30mb/s (ish) speed cards for now and they seem to work fine.

Digital Camera Memory Brands
Does brand name really make a difference? Maybe. We tend to stay with Sandisk as the first choice although they do cost more. I’ve seen “off brand” cards such as ADATA fail and get corrupted. Not to say that Sandisk memory cards are not prone to corruption, but it seems like they are less likely to suffer from data corruption issues. Good memory card recovery software is an essential tool for many photographers, and the higher end Sandisk cards come with Recovery Pro photo recovery software which I have used to recover many photos from corrupt cards. Funny thing is that I’ve never had to use this software on any Sandisk cards yet, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if a Sandisk card does get corrupted in the future since it does seem to happen to other cards once in a while.

We will purchase some larger capacity Sandisk cards next. On the list of brands of CF memory cards that have “failed” are aData and Lexar. We have had a Lexar 8gb 133x CF card get corrupted, but we were able to recover about 98% of the pictures on the card with the Sandisk Rescue Pro software. The next CF card that we will purchase will be the same Sandisk 30mb/s card with 16gb capacity. Hopefully these cards will satisfy the hunger of the 5d for a while.

Pennywise