SD cards and GigaByte leaps

I bought my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 4100, back in April 2005. It came with an SD card with, if I recall correctly, 500 MB of storage. (It might have had even less storage - I can go through my old cards and find out. But it cost a hell of a lot.) Back in the mid-1990's, when I was the Statistical Process Control Coordinator for a major CD manufacturer, I stored, collated, and analyzed data for all of our CD presses on two 500 MB hard drives, so having the memory equivalent on a card the size of a postage stamp and thickness of a dime was amazing.

I managed to crack the screen on that first camera after coming home from a trip to Harrisburg a year and a few months later, in August 2006. By then I think I had graduated from 500 MB cards to ones that held 1 GB. This was an incredible increase in capacity, but not as amazing as the 2 GB cards that became my standard storage with my replacement camera, a Nikon Coolpix L4.

When I got my current camera in March 2014, a Nikon Coolpix p520, I realized I had to move up to a new level of storage. I still had plenty of 2 GB SD cards in packages waiting to be used, since my L4 was still functioning (and still is; I use it as my "car" camera, keeping it in the car so I always have it with me, just in case), but the p520 had a much higher resolution and much larger image size, and needed a card with more storage capacity. Fortunately 8 GB cards had become available, so that was what I installed next.

The SDHC card I just filled up yesterday dates from March 2016 and had a capacity of 32 GB.  I don't recall how many 8 GB cards I filled up before I bought this, but it was probably more than a few. The 32 GB card held just over 10,000 images.

Today I bought a two-pack of 64 GB SDXC cards for $29.99. If I continue to fill the card as I did this last one, the first card should last four years, filling up sometime in 2022. If the second one lasts another four years - assuming I can locate it four years from now, when I need to replace the first one - then it will fill up sometime in 2026, when the camera is twelve years old, which is probably beyond the reasonable life expectancy of a p520. We'll see what happens!