Digital Camera Memory Card

Digital Camera Memory Card

Does a camera memory card lose its ability to produce quality pictures when constantly reused?

I have a Canon PowerShot A80 4 meg digital camera, being about 3 1/2 years old with same memory card. Would the quality of a picture suffer to any degree if it is used over and over, that is, taking a photo then deleting it after it is downloaded onto a computer.

Not really. Unlike magnetic tape, where each write/erase cycle gets the media a little more worn out - there is no such thing with flash memory.

Flash memory either works, or it does not. If it fails, you won't be able to write or read from it. Otherwise, you'll read the exact same data that has been written, to a single bit. So while the card is good, there is no such thing as quality loss.

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That said, flash memory does have a finite number of writes available to it. It is usually counted in hundreds of thousands of numbers of writes, before it may fail for that reason alone.

What that means to you - that means that you are good for at least 100,000 pictures, before you need to start worrying about the integrity of your memory (or better have it replaced before it fails). That is usually more than the lifetime of average camera shutter....

Even if you fill the card, then erase and re-format it, it won't extend it's life more, because basically each part of a card has the same lifetime, but every time you store a new picture on it, aside from writing physical data, the camera modifies, and hence re-writes the the file allocation table, where information about every file on card is stored. And that is usually contained on the same physical location, unless the hardware purposely moves it around the card to extend it's life (I doubt cameras are THAT smart).

But worry not. if your card is 3 1/2 years old, you would've needed to take an average of 78 pictures per day to reach that useful life limit. And that's out of assumption that it's 100,000 writes, which in fact can be a lot more! Unless you're a professional photographer or a crazy traveler, you should be ok!

LEM.