Well, it’s been awhile since anybody’s sued me for calling their bullshit what it is, so I figured I’d trot out this ridiculously overpriced 128MB SD card with a pretty “sporting goods” brand label on it (they want $20 for this thing!). The site even helpfully offers this “advice” about your new technological acquisition:

To avoid missing any trophy shots it is helpful to have two SD cards. Once you are ready to check your pictures, simply replace the full card with a blank card; you can rest easy knowing you are not missing any pictures while you check your photos.

You’ll need this advice with any reasonably-modern camera with this $20 128MB SD card in it — with my new camera shooting pictures that, on the “highest compression high resolution” option, chew up 800KB a piece on average, you’ll only get about 150 pictures or so on a card before it’s full.

Or you could just take that same $20 and buy a 2 gigabyte card — holding 2,560 images at the same settings on the same form-factor card, for the same money.

I’ve routinely seen places like Wal-Mart and Best Buy taking advantage of the impulse buyer (and the folks who just got their first digital camera, don’t know the terminology yet, and don’t do much comparison shopping) with bad pricing on cheap gear — 512MB SD and CF cards go for $20 to $30, while 1GB USB pen/stick drives go for up to $50 at Office Depot (ugh), but this pricing is bat-shit crazy, especially since it’s online.

I’m not making up the 2GB price — it’s $17.95 including shipping. The 1GB USB drives that sell for $30 to $50 at Office Depot are $10.95 including shipping these days.

Maybe I’m just cheap, but I hate being ripped off, and I loathe seeing other people being ripped off just because they want to do their shopping all in one place, even when it’s online where it largely doesn’t matter.

The bottom line on storage, whether in a camera or a regular ol’ computer, has always been the same, with variations only present when non-standard needs arise:

• You just want lots of storage without breaking the bank. The most cost-effective solution in this most-common case is to buy the maximum number of storage elements the system can accept (without sacrificing performance), with each element being at the storage capacity that costs the least amount per storage unit. I.e. if your desktop’s got room for two hard disks, it’s currently cheapest to stick two 500GB drives in the machine (costing $0.17996 per gigabyte). The other options (bigger and smaller) are more expensive per gigabyte.
• You want the most storage you can shove into the machine, regardless of cost. Buy as many elements as your system will hold, and buy the elements with the largest capacity. With that same desktop example, you’d shove two 1 terabyte disks into the machine, at $0.27795 per gigabyte.
• You’re nearly broke but you need a new disk. The cheapest SATA disk I see on Pricewatch right now is a 40GB drive for $28. A more sane per-gigabyte price is a 160GB drive for $41.99.

Most digital cameras, of course, only have the one memory slot, so your purchase of just one card has to be done intelligently.

If you care about spending your cash wisely, the “sweet spot” right now is the 4GB SD card, at $29.99 ($7.4975 per gigabyte). Of course, that will hold over five thousand pictures, or a whole buttload of video (or a very big combination of both).

Or you could just spend $20 (shipping not included) and buy a 128MB card, holding 1/32nd as much data for 2/3rd the price. Sigh.