memory card

geoff1965

geoff1965

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a m8 posted this on face book

just a little note to all you novices at photography like me. I hadnt realised, stupidly or not, how much the speed of your memory card changes the performance of your camera.I have recently got a faster memory chip and my burst mode is now ACTUALLY a burst mode, even shooting in raw and using bracketing at the same time. Just a thought.

Is this true and if so what card would you recommend me to buy for a canon eos 400d

thanx
Geoff
 
Yes, it's 100% true, or at least it is when it comes to emptying the buffer.

My camera shoots at 12 fps in burst mode, but can only do so for about 1.5 seconds before the buffer is full when shooting raw at 24 MB per shot, at which point you have to wait first for the camera to become useable again (space in the buffer to accept at least one more shot), and then longer still before the buffer is empty and you can do another 18 shots.

I did some tests with different cards. Here are the APPROXIMATE results from memory:

Class 4 SDHC card: 25 seconds to become useable, 45 seconds to empty the buffer.

Class 6 SDHC card: 15 seconds to become useable, 22 seconds to empty the buffer.

Class 10, Class 1 UHS SDHC card: 8 seconds to become useable, 15 seconds to empty the buffer.

I guess it depends also on your camera's buffer and the cards it will support; UHS is no use to you if the camera doesn't support it.
 
simonblue said:
Depend on how fast you want to shoot,do you need fast burst.

Have a look at the sandisk cards :)
Click to expand...

Mine were all Sandisks, so just saying "Sandisk" tells you nothing; it's not the make that counts (for speed), it's the spec.

BTW, Sandisk Extreme SDHC cards are very very cheap on My Memory.com at the moment; about half the price of the next cheapest vendor I could find.
 
I've just ordered 4 of the sandisk extremes on mymemory. Had my first card failure today with an integral so that's going in the bin. It's not that old and hasn't been used that much. Only lost about 2 photos though. Hadn't taken a spare card as I never have problems with cards even though I usually buy transcend or integral. Ahem.

A spare card is invariably cheaper than the fuel to go there again.
 
No that's right, it's only really a problem with high resolution cameras with high burst rates (big files being created very fast). If I reduce my burst rate from high to low, and/or shoot in jpeg, I can pretty much keep shooting as long as I want.
 
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Southdowns said:
BTW, Sandisk Extreme SDHC cards are very very cheap on My Memory.com at the moment; about half the price of the next cheapest vendor I could find.
Click to expand...

Just had a look as I'm toying with the idea of getting a few more cards for holiday as opposed to taking my netbook to empty full cards.

They're more expensive than amazon direct :shrug:

You had me all hopeful :'(
 
It's worth bearing in mind that the class rating of a card is only vague description of its speed - its real world throughput can be quite different, as this comparison of various cards with a D7000 shows. (Not to mention the fact that different cameras have different maximum transfer speeds to the card, regardless of the card's top speed - in the D90's case, about 20MB/s; only bumped to about 27MB/s on the D7000, it would seem)

Certainly, going from a random brand card to a Sandisk 30MB/s made for quite a difference in burst performance on my D90 - for such a modest outlay, it was easily worth gaining.
 
geoff1965 said:
a m8 posted this on face book

just a little note to all you novices at photography like me. I hadnt realised, stupidly or not, how much the speed of your memory card changes the performance of your camera.I have recently got a faster memory chip and my burst mode is now ACTUALLY a burst mode, even shooting in raw and using bracketing at the same time. Just a thought.

Is this true and if so what card would you recommend me to buy for a canon eos 400d

thanx
Geoff
Click to expand...

A doubtfully runner!
 
faddius said:
Just had a look as I'm toying with the idea of getting a few more cards for holiday as opposed to taking my netbook to empty full cards.

They're more expensive than amazon direct :shrug:

You had me all hopeful :'(
Click to expand...

Could you post a link? I just had a look; 32 GB is £25.99 on My Memory, £27.99 on Amazon. Agreed not as much cheaper as when I looked before, but still cheaper.

Might be different for other capacities of course.
 
Why would you use 32gb cards.
They hold to many images if the card fails you say good bye to to many images. Smaller cards change more but less chance of losing all images from that day.

Adrian
 
Because at 24mb each (not to mention video), 32GB doesn't hold that many shots, because my shoots aren't that critical so convenience trumps security, because I'm not paranoid about card failure, because I'm more likely to lose a card that's not in the camera than I am to suffer a failure, and because just because it has the capacity (in case I need it), doesn't mean I have to fill it; I can choose to change the card early if I'm worried about losing some of the shots.

Does that answer your question? :)
 
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Yes it does. Still 1333.3 images

Thats a lots all I'm saying more than I would take in a day.
 
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Yes it is a lot, though I filled that and all my other cards at the recent Northumberland meet.

Point is, I think this "lots of small cards" idea is a bit of a fallacy. My shots are a LOT safer on a card inside my camera than they are on one in my bag/pocket, and who's to say that the one small card that fails/gets lost/gets crushed isn't the one with the day's killer shot on it?

If a card fails in the camera, I at least have a chance of recovering the data when I get home, whereas if I leave one on the beach, it's gone forever.

Also, I'd rather take the risk of losing shots through a (pretty unlikley) card failure than the risk of not getting them in the first place because I ran out of storage space.
 
How reputable are mymemory for cards then? Any talk of them selling counterfeit ones at all?
 
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