Is it worth paying more for higher speed SD cards

D

diggerz

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348
Edit My Images
Yes
I mainly take sport/action shots and in raw as well and sometimes find that I'm missing shots because my D80 is huffing & puffing its little lungs out trying to write to my cheapo 4 GB SD card from asda. To teach me another lesson it takes eons to upload to my laptop. So is it really worth paying the extra for higher write speeds?

Cheers Paul :thumbs: :thumbsdown:
 
Depends, if your camera can write faster than it is at the moment then yes, its worth it.
 
If your shooting raw the file size will be fairly large, but not as large as raw+jpeg. If the write speed of the cheap card means the data can't get written faster than the camera can shoot then the camera buffer starts to fill. Once the buffer is full, the camera will only take another shot when the buffer has enough room, then it will repeat this cycle of shoot and write untill it has a chance to write everything and clear the buffer.


Compare your frame rate with the 'cycle time(shot to shot)' for 'continuous mode raw' with the figures here>
www.imaging-resource.com D80 As these used an extreme 3 card.
 
OH MY GOD YES


why would you get a decent TV and then try to put a signal into it using rubber bands and sticky tape...okay, over the top but but when I use my "well that's a great price for a CF card" piece of pants from mymemory it's slower, takes ages to read and write from the buffer, it loses images...utter cack
quality brand or sandisk all the way for me, even reviewing your snaps on a cheapo card becomes a chore
 
Yes. Go with SanDisk Extreme III.
 
I've got a Sandish 8GB SD Card which was about £15 off of eBay and works perfectly fine

Only shoot in RAW so offers plenty of room for the photos
 
The quicker you can shoot the faster you fill them up so I say no take it slow. 8gb Kingstons are fine for me at around £16 a pop. :D
 
The speed of the card does make a difference and you don't have to pay a fortune for fast cards and readers.

I've got some class 6, 8gb cards for less than £12 each delivered. For some reason a 16gb card costs more than 2x 8gb cards. I went for a couple of 8gb cards for this reason and if you only have one 16gb card on you and it goes down, you might not have another card to use.

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/default.php?cat=6&type=6021&man=202&filterwords=&go=SEARCH&comp=

I found this SDHC card reader on Amazon for 22p. It's faster than any other card reader I've used. I think the seller wants £2 postage, but still a bargin.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000VY80AM/ref=ox_ya_oh_product
 
Not worth bothering if you have done the maths!!!

i have come to the conclusion that all SD cards are too slow for non-stop continuous shooting. fastest SD cards can only transfers at 6MB/s now a raw file for a 10mp CCD is 10MB (wow what a surprise!) so you always gonna get to a situation when your internal buffer gets filled up. So not worth bothering at all!

however for CF cards its a different story...it can theoretically achieve upto 40MB/s so you can have 4fps continuously shooting without worrying about your buffer getting filled, that's why all the pro range cameras have CF and hobbist camera has SD.
 
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