At the end of last year [URL="http://dpnow.com/6573.html"]Samsung released a range of memory cards[/URL] with various guarantees of resistance to potential damage, including water damage and magnetism.

In February it was widely reported that a [URL="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8510314.stm"]Spanish fisherman found a digital camera[/URL] in his catch that had been accidentally dropped overboard by a South African couple on a cruise on the Queen Mary II from New York to Southampton in 2008. The owners of the camera had been traced because five images were salvaged from the memory card inside the camera. They had been at the bottom of the sea for an incredible two years and still survived.

I had actually been alerted to this story by Lexar's PR company because they were trying to find out if the memory card in drowned camera was one of theirs... naturally if it was it would have been a PR coup. I haven't heard from them since, so maybe it wasn't one of theirs!

Meanwhile, Samsung embeds the innards of its new premium line memory cards (thought not apparently Compact Flash models) in a water-resistant epoxy resin. If the card is physically damaged and an emergency recovery of the data is required, a soak in a resin solvent is required to gain access to the flash memory chips within.

I have to admit that I was sceptical about the warnings concerning the potential threat of magnetic fields; it's never been highlighted as a danger for data stored on flash memory devices, to my knowledge, and I queried this with Samsung. It turned out that they couldn't offer any solid evidence that magnetic fields in normal use could damage data on memory cards, but at least their cards won't move around under the influence of such fields, unlike other cards!

It has to be wondered if the resin-embedded feature of some Samsung cards is actually needed too, if the experience of the couple who dropped their camera in the sea is anything to go by.

Personally, I've accidentally left ordinary memory cards in clothes that have been put through the laundry, and these have also survived without problems, not that I would recommend this practise!

Whenever I have experienced problems with memory cards, especially more fragile SD cards, it has more often been a physical damage problem, where the card has been crushed or twisted.