Are all SD cards created equal?

I have a Samsung 5.1mp camera and have been using an Impact 1 GB SD card with it. The camera takes great photos and I wanted another SD card so I bought a Kodak 2GB brand because it was a great price.

Does the SD card have anything to do with the quality of the photos? My mom has had a Kodak camera before and the photo quality wasn't nearly as good.

1) "Are all SD cards created equal?" I'm sure there's some differences in the reliability of SD cards, but I've never had one actually fail in the past 6 years of using memory cards for various digital cameras. Given that few "big name" SD cards are actually made by the company on the label, and the chips are made by still somebody else, it's hard to to tell who made what and its reliability.

The best answer I can think of : A good indicator of quality is probably the length of the warranty.

Once, the batteries died in my camera just at the moment when a photo was being written. As a result, all the photos in the card were corrupt. But that wasn't the fault of the card. A simple re-format of the card made it usable again, but I lost all the stored pictures taken up that point.

2) "Does the SD card have anything to do with the quality of the photos?" It really shouldn't. The quality of the camera determines how good the photo is, not the storage - unless the storage fails for some reason.

If you have a SD slot on your computer, or if you have a USB plug-in SC memory card reader, you can have your computer scan your SD card for errors, the same way you'd have it look for errors on your hard drive. I've never seen any bad spots in my camera cards (or flash) drives in all the 6 years I've been using one or the other....

As long as you have a memory card for a mainstream card maker (and there are many good ones you may never heard of) and you did not buy it on eBay (sorry eBay, but you have to reign in these companies selling fake cards and bate and switch camera stores), you should enjoy saving your images to any card that your camera will use.

Storage is just saving images in a series of 0' and 1's. If the camera you are using or your technique is poor, the card will record that as well as images taken by the best of the best. It is just like film ... the image quality has mostly to do with the cameras lens, sensor and the camera's operator.

the storage has not so much to do with image quality and more to do with how many photos you can write to a card and how fast this can happen. Don't get me wrong I am sure some brands are more reliable then others.

To paraphrase the answer, 'some are more equal than others', i.e some cards will have a better/faster 'write' speed. Lexar is a good name for write speeds, but then there is always Sandisk.