Media Memory, Oh Man it’s Gotten Cheap

The first time I bought memory was on the eve of my first trip to China in January of 2001.

My 2.1 megapixel Canon Digital Elph which was a killer deal at the time at $430. A truly exceptional camera. My prints from this and other trips were eventually shown in a gallery in Kirkland, Washington.

Even then I knew then that memory was too expensive, I had no choice. I bought a single 128mb Compact Flash card for $120 plus tax. That’s a per-gigabyte cost of $1,055. Way I saw it, it was still cheaper than film with exceptional quality, even then.

Pile-Of-Memory-CardsYesterday I bought a 64Gb Micro SD card for $18.99 with no tax and no shipping cost. That’s a per-gig cost of $0.30 cents. You tell me, woud you rather pay $1,055 per gig of memory, or thirty-cents… That’s what I thought.

So because I love numbers and I thought it would be interesting, I did some research and ran the math. You know, for fun.

My 64Gb Micro SD was $18.99 (on Amazon) and is the size of my pinky nail.

If I had bought 64gb of Compact Flash cards in 2001, it would have cost $67,528 and consumed a space just larger than a 6x6x6-inch cube. It’s roughly the size of 54 Rubik’s Cubes.

64 gigs of 2001 Compact Flash cards would weigh 11 & 1/2 pounds. 64 gigs of Micro SD card weighs .4 grams. For perspective, a feather is only .56 grams. So it’s as light as a feather, assuming a decent sized bird.

If my current 16 MegaPixel camera only had 128 megabytes of storage, I could only take about 30-40 pictures. I could fit about 16,000 such pictures on my new Micro SD card.

On my first China tour, I’d shot modestly during the day in what is today considered very low resolution (1600×1200) and each night I would delete all the pictures that were anything short of awesome. There was no video on cameras back then, so it was nothing but images. In the end I’d come home with 70-80 pictures and still think I got a great deal.

Later trips I brough three memory cards, and by the time we were doing tours into Canada, Puerto Rico and the various west coast cities, memory had caught up with practicality.

So don’t think twice about memory, guys. It’s as cheap as water now. It used to be something only people with means could acquire, now it’s something you could lose in your couch cushions without regret. And not just because it’s that small, but also because it’s that cheap.

2 Comments on Media Memory, Oh Man it’s Gotten Cheap

  1. Oh, you youngsters are so silly. I remember paying $10 for a single-sided, single density floppy. Thing would only hold a fraction of a single picture today and took a solid ten minutes to read. Terrible.

  2. Can only speak from experience. I guess I got in to the memory game late, but not nearly late enough.

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