Does the speed of an SD card matter?

Obviously a newbie here...just bought a Kodak P850 and will need an SD card asap. Best Buy had crazy deals on cards Sunday night (think they were like $30 for 512MB and sub-$50 for 1GB). Can I just go bargain shopping or do I need to spend money on good stuff? Any recommendations?

Although I'm looking forward to taking some decent wakeboarding shots, this is basically for taking pictures of kids and their activities, snapshots, occasional portraits and of course just for fun recording of outdoor sports, airshows, etc.

Will probably take a fair amount (for a camera) of 30 fps VGA Quicktime or motion-jpeg (whatever that format is) at least at first. Probably won't shoot stills at 5MP much. Don't have a laptop, so when we vacation, I won't be able to download to clear memory.

Any help would be appreciated.

the speed of memory cards DOES make a difference in how fast information is transferred both on AND off of them. that being said i dont know how fast information is transferred to your card from the camera. if the camera doesnt transfer information fast enough you its possible that you might not even see a difference in the faster card since the camera will be the bottle neck and not the card.

i'd definitely get the bigger card, and i wouldnt skimp out on price. what money you put into a card NOW will affect your transfer speeds and also how much video/pics you can hold. the 1 gig card will come in handy especially since you plan on shooting videos with it.

A 2 gig card will give you more room to play with if you want to shoot video, but just a heads up that the video will not be like a normal video camera. It's probably 320x240 just like the clips you see on the web...

Even if you shoot at 5 MP with a 1 gig card you can still get a lot of photos on card. Plus the great thing about shooting at 5MP is that you have a larger image to work so you have more option when it comes to cropping the image.

If you don't have a laptop to take on your vacation. Then for $90-100 you can pick up an external hard drive with a built in card reader like this: http://www.edgetechcorp.com/store/EDGDG35HDREADHUB.htm This will allow you to shoot pics/videos all day, transfer them at night, and be ready to shoot more the next day. (The drive I listed above is just from comparison sake, I will check with Arun, see which drive he uses, and let you know...)

Thanks guys!

Derek ~ Scott a and Fu got you covered on your question. I just wanted to say that it's cool that you put the pic of your Epic on the LCD screen. Pretty clever.

There's a little cove in Topoch Gorge a couple bends north of the sandbar at Havasu we found this summer. Been by it many times but never realized it was there. We spotted this bouy tucked between a rock face and some bushes, stopped and returned to find a little channel to cruise into. Anyway, we saw what looked like crosses up on a hill and walked up there to check them out. On the way up, I kept looking at the boat floating in this little rock arena and thought 'that's a great boat portrait'. Haven't taken any really good pics of the boat since the first year, but it's time for sure. Kids and stuff are cool, but boat portraits are where it's REALLY at. Such a dork, I know, but I will so go back there next year, mainly to take that picture.

Arun sports an older Wolverine 7 in 1 which I couldn't find online. Here's the latest version with a LCD screen:

http://secure.serverlab.net/shop/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=7040&Categor y_Code=MultiMedia&Store_Code=T00107

The price is around $200...

Thing's pretty awesome. Makes you wonder though if it makes much more sense than getting a 'value' laptop.

Was going to get a single 1GB stick for now, but ended up getting this combo pack for $39.99 after rebate. This will surely get us through until next summer - maybe a fast 1 or 2GB will be easier to swing then. Thanks for the help!