Help needed buying memory for Olympus E520

• stephaniekel

  Member

  May 12, 2009 at 8:05 pm

  Hi I just bought a Olympus E520 but my query is do I need the compact flash and a xD memory card?
  rc53

  Member

  May 12, 2009 at 9:24 pm

  You don’t need both, either CF or XD will work alone.
  You can choose which one to use, if you have both.
  You can’t save simultaneously to both — on other cameras you can, for example, save raw files to one card and jpgs to the other.

  It takes forever to format the XD cards. Max capacity, afaik, is 2GB.
  You can only use the ‘M’ cards for panos — otherwise there is absolutely no advantage in XD.

  However, the XD format is now only used by Olympus, and is well past its best before date.
  I would forget it, simply go for CF — simple, easy to find etc.
  IOP

  Participant

  May 12, 2009 at 11:18 pm

  rc53 wrote:

  However, the XD format is now only used by Olympus, and is well past its best before date.
  I would forget it, simply go for CF — simple, easy to find etc.

  Hear, hear! XD is a horribly slow format, even copying files back to your computer takes at least twice as long as CF. The only real benefit is if you’re caught out and run out of memory on the CF card, you can then switch over to the XD, but only if you’ve no extra CF cards handy,

  Dave