Camera Memory Card Speeds

[Tosh McCaber]

I followed up on a thread a few days ago, discussing the very differing speeds of what are nominally similar SD, etc, camera cards. Some are able to read/write many times faster than others. (I don't know whether the thread was on Pprune or some other forum.)

Can anyone recommend a good SD card, for being able to take several shots one after the other, without having to wait for buffering to take place?

[Rick Storm]

Depends how much you want to pay out and MB size of card, for e.g Jessops (photo dealer) do a 80x max speed/150 KB/s 512MB SD card for £64.99 up to a 2GB card for 159.99

SanDisk do a 60x 512MB £53.99 they also do a 133x high speed 1GB card £124.99

Rick

[Tosh McCaber]

Thanks- my camera is a Kodak V570 compact 5Mp, and the size of card(s) would be 256 or 512mb- I'm not looking for super-performance- just looking for a card that will be able to take several shots one after the other, without waiting for buffering.

[Rick Storm]

The cards above will give a buffering of about 1sec between shots, if you have selected 'picture quality' at 5MP. Normal or low res (for e-mail) the buffering would be less than 1sec. (Tip) If your using flash you would still have a delay while it charges up again no matter what xxxtimes speed your card is.

There again it depends on the download speed of camera (photo) to card? You'll never see this in the instruction book, the more £££££ you pay for the camera the faster the chip is to down load to the card. Faster chip=faster loading onto card 133x card very speedy to absorb the data from camera.

Q: Why do you need such instant data capture? Is it for sports photography? I'm curious.

Rick

[innuendo]

This site has a test report on card speeds.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-7896-8483
For me, a couple of advantages of faster cards are speed in emptying the buffer, (raw + full res Jpeg fills the buffer quickly), and also copying card contents to my portable storage device. IE the faster I can transfer the data to the PSD the longer the battery lasts.
If you have ever tried using an IPod as a PSD you will know what I am on about. BTW I have a Nexto PSD with a 60GB drive which works very well.

[Conan the Librarian]

The card shouldn't really be the issue here. What is needed and provided on most decent cameras, is a buffer that will take at the very least 3 or 4 JPG and ideally RAW files. For comparison, my own will do 21 RAW files at 15MB per pop, before the card itself comes into play. I cannot believe that a Kodak Compact would have a buffer where the cardspeed itself became an issue, unless the user was burst shooting and that for a few seconds.

And now for something different. 1GB SD card. Cheap cheerful and £10.99. 2GB version around £23-£24. Forget Jessops. PM will bring details. If you really want a higher speed SD card, then let me know and I will find you a good price. My finger is on the pulse with this issue, though not many others...

Conan

[Rick Storm]

Fantastic 1GB (SD) £10.99 2GB £23-24 PM me for details/web site, the average, Joe ain't no interest in RAW files, just jpeg

Rick

[Conan the Librarian]

Rick, check your PMs.

Conan

[IO540]

The degree, if any, to which the advertised card "speed" makes any difference depends on the camera.

I don't think it makes the slightest difference in any of the standard sub-£300 miniature cameras. It will probably be noticeable on a top end DSLR and could be relevant if you are taking pictures in a rapid sequence.

I have had a number of cameras, up to a £1000 DSLR, and have never noticed anything obvious. I always buy the cheap cards.

Just once, I bought a "special" 256MB SD card which was about 4x the normal price, which supported some sort of nibble mode; I never looked up the specs (too lazy, despite being an electronics design engineer) but it's basically a higher speed mode which enables the data to be loaded in bigger blocks at a time. Most of the flash memory chips used in these cartridges support some such mode. I found that the only device I had which took advantage of this high speed mode was a particular PDA, whose backup function ran about 2x faster - hardly worth the extra cost.

[Conan the Librarian]

The central issue here, is whether you have a buffer onboard the camera. On older and lower specced models, the fast "Camera" buffer might be small or even absent altogether. If the camera has to write direct to the card, then cardspeed will come into play (and it is also noticeably faster when being read by a USB 2.0 card reader) but I find it hard to believe that any recent camera on the far side of around a hundred quid, would not have such a dedicated buffer.


Conan