Can Panasonic Lumix FZ5 use 2-gig SD card?

I just got my camera couple of weeks ago. I see in the manual a table
of how many pics, at what resolution, an SD card can hold, depending on
its size. The table goes up to 1 gigabyte. Is that a hard limit of the
FZ5, or is it a matter of there weren't any 2-gig SD cards being made
when the camera was introduced, and the manual was printed? I prefer to
use the full 5 mega-pixels in TIFF format, and crop or jpeg the image
after the fact (Gimp under linux). Is anybody successfully using a
2-gig SD card on this camera?

I don't have any other electronic gizmos that need an SD card, so I'd
be wasting money if it won't work. Cameras seem to have proprietary
quirks with their pseudo-file-systems. Just because FAT16 partitions up
to 2 gigs work on hard drives, doesn't necessarily imply that they work
on cameras.

 

According to folks in the Panasonic Forum at www.dpreview.com, 2-gig cards
work just fine in the FZ5.

--
Bob Murphy
Marietta, GA


"Walter Dnes (delete the 'z' to get my real address)"

 

"Walter Dnes (delete the 'z' to get my real address)"

Since the controller is on the card itself, and not in the device, it should
work fine.
The only problem cards I'm aware of were SmartMedia cards (which capped off
at 128) and the original Sony Memory stick.

CF, SD, MMC, and other more recent cards all have the controller on-card,
which means the device doesn't have to be anything special...unless you get
over 4GB, which means it has to have a firmware that can handle large
"disks/cards." FAT32.

 

Thanks for the info, and the pointer to the forum. I had checked the
the camera specs on www.dpreview.com, but I somehow overlooked the forum.

 

I seem to remember the FAT16 maximum being 2 gigs. That should
handle 122 tiff-quality shots at 2560x1920. If you want to do any
editing (other than rotations in exact multiples of 90 degrees), you
will suffer degradation if you start from a jpeg. Better to have an
original "archive copy" tiff, and work with copies of that.

Storing more images would require extra work by Panasonic. I know
that Microsoft's patent on all FAT filesystems has been revoked. But
they might have an argument for a FAT32 patent. Other options are...

- multiple FAT16 partitions of up to 2 gigs each. Not a bad idea.

- file compression. zip is half decent. bzip2 (http://www.bzip.org)
is even better. Here's a comparison with half a dozen tifs, and
zip (max compression, not default) and bzip2 compression results...

[m450][waltdnes][~/camera] ll *.tif *.zip *.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:45 p1000032.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 7840984 Jul 8 13:45 p1000032.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 10581208 Jul 9 21:15 p1000032.tif.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:50 p1000033.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 8429324 Jul 8 13:50 p1000033.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 11166267 Jul 9 21:15 p1000033.tif.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:52 p1000034.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 8071247 Jul 8 13:52 p1000034.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 11255898 Jul 9 21:15 p1000034.tif.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:53 p1000035.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 7405305 Jul 8 13:53 p1000035.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 10536870 Jul 9 21:15 p1000035.tif.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:54 p1000036.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 8015679 Jul 8 13:54 p1000036.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 10958210 Jul 9 21:16 p1000036.tif.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 14761984 Jul 8 13:56 p1000037.tif
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 6353108 Jul 8 13:56 p1000037.tif.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 waltdnes users 9121470 Jul 9 21:16 p1000037.tif.zip

compression programs might be too much of a load on a camera. You'd
need a cpu, a simple operating system, and ram. Probably go through
batteries like crazy, even if it could be done.