I’ve been keeping an eye on the Memory Stick Duo prices on amazon.co.uk lately, as I’m looking to augment my current 1GB Memory Stick Duo with another, preferrably a 2GB one.

When I first started looking just after Christmas (3 months ago), 2GB Memory Stick Duos were still only available on pre-order, and the price was ridiculously high. 1GB Memory stick Duo’s were being sold at around £80, compared to a high street price of around £95.

Three months later and the price of a 2GB Memory Stick Duo is now down to a more reasonable (but still prohibitive) £75-£80 , with 1GB cards down to £35-£40. These can be had for less if you are willing to use the market place sellers, or buy second hand.

The fall in price is partly due to the news that 4GB and 8GB Memory Stick Duo cards are to be made available, plus the fact that the Memory Stick Duo cards are not limited to use in the PSP, but can also be used in other Sony electronic products, such as cameras and mobile phones.

So why do I need another Memory Stick Duo? Well, at the moment a 1GB memory Stick Duo is sufficient to hold one decent length movie that isn’t over-compressed (between 750mb and 900mb), plus a few homebrew games. I could compress the films down to fit more on the Memory Stick Duo, but I don’t like to sacrifice quality, and the space gained doesn’t justify the extra compression and loss of appearance.

With the amount of homebrew games and applications you can download, plus the associated game roms and bios images, using the PSP to play your favoutite emulated games can take up alot of Memory Stick Duo space, and constantly having to delete data to make room for a particular game or film is time consuming and annoying.

Ideally I would like a 1GB Memory Stick Duo exclusively for homebrew, so once a game is installed and setup it doesn’t need to be deleted again until I’ve properly finished with it. I would then love a 2GB Memory Stick Duo to hold PSP movies and music. With a 2GB card, a single PSP film plus ten or more music albums would provide sufficient visual and audio entertainment for those times I don’t feel like playing a game on the PSP.

The downside of having more than one Memory Stick Duo of course is that you have to have some way of transporting them without them getting damaged. I currently use a slimline hardcase for UMD’s that has space for a couple of Memory cards, so this is one solution. The other is to not have 2 memory cards, instead replace the 1GB Memory Stick Duo with a single 4GB or even 8GB Memory Stick Duo. These capacities would remove any storage issues in the short term, and even cope with 2 or more films plus all the music and homebrew I would want available.

Of course as bigger storage capacity becomes the norm, homebrew games are likely to become bigger to take advantage of the extra Memory Stick Duo storage capacity.

So, do I wait for the price of the 2GB Memory Stick Duo to fall even further, wait until the 4GB card comes to market, or wait until the 8GB card is available and hope thatits release pushes the proce of the smaller capacity Memory Stick Duo’s down even further?