Zv said:
I'm very much interested in how this thinking of the need for dual card slots came about. At what point in the history of photography did people start to fear the loss of their pictures so much that it drove the demand to include a second card slot?
While you didn't bring it up, in this forum this is the classic anti-dual slot Canon apologist argument is "since the beginning of digital, everyone had 1 slot, we were OK"
This is beyond irrelevant and fallacious.
First of all, it is anti-progress. It denies and resists progress.
Secondly, to compare it in a way that will help illustrate how silly this line of arguments are --
Cars did not have seatbelts at one time...
Homes did not have smoke detectors / fire alarms...
Microsoft Word didn't have auto-save...
Yes, the world still went on, but data was more easily lost. In the early days of digital, photographers ran with more risk during their shoots. Yes, while card failures are indeed rare -- there have been and still are events that are ruined because of this. There are couples to this day who have their wedding shoots ruined because of card failures.
In this day an age, that is not just bad luck or an unfortunate accident. This is the negligence of the photographer not securing the data because today, there are options. Back then, there weren't any options other than running two cameras. Which many did regardless since they would rather have 2 cameras than swapping lenses. Either way, only one camera is going to capture the first kiss.
Some say film was was worse. I disagree. While statistically more film was ruined due to user error than cards have ever failed -- the key is 'user error'
I never ruined a roll of film forgetting to rewind on my old Minolta. Discipline. I have control over it. There's ZERO control over whether a memory card fails. You can be completely perfect, and on its own, for reasons unknown it just dies on you.
One would expect, for a $2,000 body dual cards would be a given.
If we are to assume that the average person snaps their precious photos on a smartphone or point and shoot then surely those devises should be the ones to first include a back up system, yet they don't. (Well not by default)
Most people's phones backup photos to the cloud as they are taken. Whether Apple or Android. This wasn't the case at the beginning of smartphones, but it is something valued and exists today. It was even marketed as an important aspect of using their cloud services. Backup and save your photos. All your precious moments safe from loss.
If anything dual slots should be included in the lowest end of the camera spectrum as those consumers are more likely to have cheaper and less reliable SD cards.
This is a fallacy. While higher end cards may have a better reliability record then some generic garbage cards, they too have corruption. I had a Sandisk Pro CF card die. This was the highest quality, highest end card on the market at the time. It was pretty new too - maybe 2-3 shoots on it at most. Fortunately, the SD card in my 5D3 saved the stills. Unfortunately, I lost the video I took because 5D3 saves that to only 1 card. I had some SD cards choke too.
When I read all these "I never had a card fail" posts that so many people here, and on other forums make ...
I think, well, maybe you haven't been in a car wreck to appreciate a seatbelt and an airbag either.
After that, I think - here's a person that hasn't done much photography. If you do enough work, and enough shooting - over the course of years it is almost certain it will happen. If it doesn't you are either exceptionally lucky despite the fact that card failures are rare, or you are very low volume.
Everyone I know who has big shutter counts and has shot for years has had a card go bad on them.
Finally, most people are not computer and tech geeks. They likely don't follow technology other than new product releases. In other words, they don't read about how technology works. Memory cards have a limited read/write life. And regardless of the claims of manufactures citing X amount of read/write cycles before failure, this can and does happen a lot sooner. Not to mention, the more and more reads and writes, the more they slow down too. They degrade.
The older a card by use, the more likely it is to fail. Although, new cards go bad for no apparent reason too.
Back up is just one advantage to them but not the primary reason for the dual slots existence in these cameras.
Not according to those I've talked to and worked with. It's all about instant data redundancy. It takes a few seconds to swap out a card, so it isn't about speeding up workflow or adding more capacity. I mean really, if you can't handle your shooting and time management to swap a card out to not interrupt a session, given that even small cards hold literally hundreds of raw files - then that photog has bigger problems.
