Exposed: Tony Northrup's alternative facts on dual SD card slots

I have been a critic of Tony Northrup, a popular YouTube photography gear reviewer and spec sheet analyst, for some time. His channel which has morphed into a money making machine, has very little to do with the art of photography (check his portfolio and you will realize that he's not really a master of his domain). In his videos however he's often portraying himself as a teacher of photography, and selling various books on that topic. Unfortunately his books sell, because many people are naive enough to think that a high YouTube subscriber count equals to high photography skills. Nothing could be further from the truth here.

Being the Peter Popoff of photography, he's often promoting the most expensive gear (something I have written about here) possibly to collect more kickbacks from the hot links in his video descriptions. Some of his camera "reviews", especially on Sony, have indicated a positive bias, while he's been overly critical of Nikon and Fuji for bogus reasons (read my post about real and fake YouTube reviews). In one of his latest videos however he went further: He is straight up "manufacturing facts" Donald Trump style. I can't say I am surprised, but maybe some of you are, so I'm going to break down the issue for you.

Northrup's alternative facts about dual SD card slots

Northrup made a big stink about the single XQD card slot in Nikon's new mirrorless cameras, proclaiming it a big fail on Nikon's part, because "pros need dual cards", so these cameras are not suitable for pros. A lot of his followers called him out on that, because he was hypocritical.



Sony's full frame cameras did not have dual card slots until 2017 when the Sony A9 was launched, and he never made a big issue about it. After Canon launched their mirrorless EOS R, his criticism of the single SD card slot was very subdued. So much about consistency. Fact is: Many pros shoot with cameras that only have one card slot, saying that all pros use dual cards is just simply false. What Northrup could've talked about instead is the fact that Nikon opted for a faster and more durable option (XQD), while Canon, Sony, and Fuji are still relying on SD cards, in some cases even on the ones with older UHS-I buses that are 4 times slower than XQDs (104 MB/s vs 400 MB/s). He could've talked about how great and potential XQD technology is (and its successor CFexpress), yet he chose to make the single slot an issue, because he knew that with such controversy he will get more clicks, and more views on his videos.

Doubling down on bogus claims

To further backup his bogus claims about memory cards, Northrup went to post a link on YouTube to an online poll where he asked his followers to feedback about their memory card failures. He was respectfully called out by someone who is a statistician. I made a screen grab of that comment:



The commentator Dane McGuckian is obviously very knowledgable about this topic, and made very reasonable points, that should be generally understood by non-statisticians. Two days later Northrup published the video below, completely disregarding any concerns about improper data collection, and ignoring the comment. Very unethical in my opinion.

Breaking down the video



The video is obviously a product of a flawed online poll that no real scientist would take seriously. Yet Northrup is using this unreliable data to push a narrative that backs up his initial bogus claims. That's very concerning for a channel with over 1 million subscribers.

At 0:15 he says: "Our polling data is not perfect, but as far as I know nobody's done a bigger sampling of photographer's experiences with memory cards, so it's better than nothing and frankly it's the best that we have."

That's not how science works. Would you trust a doctor to diagnose you with the help of "better than nothing" data? I would not. The same way you should not trust Tony when it comes to opinions on photography gear - he's not an expert, even if he tries hard to look like one.

From 0:31 to 6:00 he is explaining the data of his controversial poll. What is alarming is that these days anyone can claim anything online, and if he has a large enough amount of followers, he is being taken seriously. Pretty scary.

In the later part of the video Northrup is giving advice as to how not to lose your pictures, again emphasizing cameras with dual card slots, as if that is the only way to avoid it (it's more likely that someone steals your camera than a card getting corrupted claims German photographer Stephan Wiesner).

Then he decides to talk about something that completely exposes his lack of knowledge. This is totally embarrassing:

"Plea to manufacturers: End the era of memory cards, build internal memory into the cameras. I suggest 128 gigs, or 256 gigs. Put that memory on a loop, continuously backing up photos and videos that people capture and give them a single memory card slot also. They can continue their memory card workflow, while you have that background backup working, and if they want to pull the backup they can connect USB card to their camera. In the following generation hopefully some people will accustomed to working with the internal memory, and we can get rid of that SD card entirely, we can build some redundancy checks automatically overwriting or automatically failing out particular parts of the memory that may fail, you can make very reliable internal memory if you choose to do so and it's time that we started to do that. It would also protect people who would forget their memory card."

Mark from GroovesMe.com, who just like me and many other viewers realized how clueless Northrup is, replied to him in the comments:

"Internal memory! Really?!?! We moved away from that model for a reason. I'm sure you remember how many consumer cameras used to sport internal memory. How many phones and tablets that have internal storage. I have Google Nexus 7 that has damaged internal memory. A couple of phones with damaged memory. And a number of old cameras that are worthless because they didn't include a card slot and the memory is dead.

This is a terrible idea. How many Nikon D40's are out there still taking pictures because the memory is external. All the faults of a memory card happen internally in many cases they are the same type of NAND chips. If one can corrupt the other can as well.

I've had MicroSD cards fail that I use in security cameras. Actually it is the only flash memory I've ever had fail in lots of pictures going back decades to cameras in the 90's. Even my old USB thumb drives are still all functional. These security cameras are in direct sun, extreme heat, and 24/7 recording. I normally see 1 card a year die. Of the San Disk, Samsung brands I've used both have had a failure, I'm about due for another. Actually I've had way more hard drives fail in those years than memory cards.

I've only had one SD that was DOA. From this we can extrapolate from my experience if the card is working when it first arrives it will work pretty reliably even in extreme conditions for years before failing. The best advice is to tell your viewers if they have a single card slot camera to replace their card periodically probably once a year and reserve the old card for backup, or overflow. If they are using a single card slot camera for critical/professional photos they should do what us old timers back in film did and use several bodies to distribute the pictures across just in case one of the rolls (cards) is damaged, exposed, defective, or any other calamity.

This is much ado about nothing. Sure someone can drop a card step on it and then claim the card failed when used. That is the outlier. More likely the card is overused. NAND has a lifespan and pretty predictable failure rate. If you are a professional replace your bloody cards periodically and it is all good. No drama. No fuss.

Part of the reason I don't have dead flash drives is I stop using them periodically and they become more archival storage. If a hard drive dies I can go grab files off other drives. I do the same with external hard drives. Your mileage may vary, but my bet is that many "pros" follow similar procedures with similar results."

Conclusion

Northrup's example shows the sad state of YouTube photography channels in 2018. A lot of big names are getting more and more shameless in the way they're creating artificial controversies. It's all about click-bait these days, because channels like this need to come up with content nearly every day. And if you see Northrup's video library, most of his regular videos have views sub 50,000 - that's very poor for a channel that's heading towards 1.1 million subscribers. Every week however he stirs up a fake controversy, and one of his videos gets over 100,000 views, sometimes even two or three times of that, like with his recent Nikon videos.