Sat Apr 19, 2014 12:28 am
In its early days flash memory had a fairly limited number of write cycles on the internal memory blocks, maybe on the order of ten thousand, but the last I heard any numbers they were at ten or a hundred times that. It's my understanding that internal smarts in the cards move blocks of data around internally during large erase/write operations to even out the distribution of writes over the array and not hammer a few favorite spots. I have CF cards I've been using since 2004 without any problems, although I admit the older ones are smaller and tend not to see much use these days.
But as Dougj points out, the card is storing binary data not some mysterious analog signals. In fact, failure of a flash card will most likely show either as a file access failure, or if the reading hardware manages to somehow retrieve corrupted data from the file, card errors would likely show as stripes or pixelated blocks or other very obvious defects.
"much better quality" is not very specific -- are the differences in sharpness or contrast or color saturation or ? Are you using a different camera or photo editor than before? It is occasionally noted there are differences between brands and between models of cameras in regard to the internal tweaking or default settings of pictures as they are taken. This can mean you may want to do a little tweaking after the files are on your computer to get things the way you prefer them.
There's my speculative 2ȼ
DaveT