The current Raspbian image takes 3GB and contains about 2GB of data (compressed down to 1GB of archive). This means that a 4GB card is necessary. It's today's standard size but can it be cheaper with a smaller image ?

I managed to squeeze Raspbian down to about 520MB so a 2GB SD card is possible. But I will have to shrink the ext4 fs instead of expanding it. Who needs to fit in 2GB? Does it make sense economically? What about older systems?

OK, I have one argument for the reduction : it saves time when writing the image to the flash card so I'll see how to reduce the partition's size to about 1GB...