Memorycards

[gunslinger]

Hi,

I'm planning on buying a new CF card. I'm using a canon eos10D and memorycards now in use are sandisk ultraII, rather too slow for shooting four or five pics in a row in RAW quality. I'm not sure on which one is better; sandisk extremeIII, that claims a speed of 20Mb/s, or the Kingston Elite Pro. Who has some experience with this, or who knows which one works better?

For Example: Just imagine missing just that one opportunity to shoot just that special moment and your camera blocks because the cf card is busy saving 5 pics you've made 1 minute earlier...

[Redskin301]

I use the Sandisk Extreme III, it is a good and fast card. I don't have any problems with it

[Flyboy]

For Example: Just imagine missing just that one opportunity to shoot just that special moment and your camera blocks because the cf card is busy saving 5 pics you've made 1 minute earlier...

Appart from the cards there also is your camera. The speed of saving is allways limmited by the slowest item in the chain. So extreme fast cards as the Ultra IV are useless unless your camera can keep up with writing.

The next problem develops when you buy this nice and shiny new digital body who can write at this speed: it most likely also makes more pictures in a boost . So you end up with the same problem of not writing the data fast enough to your memorycard .

Remember the times when you had a wet film (slides) with 36 pictures on it. You used to 'think before you click' Personaly I am convinced that there lies the solution to your problem (unless you are a sports phoyographer during the soccer match of Milan agains Barca... )

Besides: Those burst of 5 shots: did you get that one single shot you wanted, or is it more of the same I learned from the guy with the heavy stuff (400-500 mm F2.8, like that heavy) that the MUST think ahead for the picture they want to make as the lens is way to heavy to keep it aimed to that fast jet making its show

grtx, Marc

[tonno1970]

Mark is right,

the eos 10d chip is limiting the writing data speed so it is unuseful to buy an expensive card.

I do not remember where but I found this in the internet.

here you find some info about cf write speed.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_ ... p?cid=6007" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


unfortunately it seems it has not the 10d (perhaps if you look all the pages down).

regards Giampaolo

[gunslinger]

No, it's not all the same. Imagine an airshow and a few fighters are rolling your way, one by one and rolling rather quick, but not with a lot of space between each other. You can depend on it that the shot of the last plane cannot be made! Making 2 or three shots of every plane is a wost case scenario.

To refer to the speed of the camera: One like mine isn't that slow, is it, or didn't I get the message...?

[sfeyenoord1]

Aparently the cf ultra II 2.0gb is preforming the best with raw on for the canon eos 350d i'm going to buy

[Flyboy]

No, it's not all the same. ... Making 2 or three shots of every plane is a wost case scenario.

That is a worst case scenario, I doubt if all pictures will be sharp as the AF will have trouble keeping up...

To refer to the speed of the camera: One like mine isn't that slow, is it, or didn't I get the message...?

I am not a Canonian, but found this on 'dpreview' I think that the Type II is the best you can use.....

Hope this helpes.. Good luck..
Marc


Storage: Compact Flash Type I or II
Drive modes
• Single
• Continuous: 3 fps up to 9 frames *
* at 1/250 sec or faster

Image processing sequence:

Record data as it comes off the image sensor, unprocessed data (approx. 9.3 MB per shot)
Store this unprocessed data in the SDRAM buffer
Take unprocessed data and convert into image files (JPEG or compressed RAW)
Buffer these converted image files (JPEG approx. 2.5 MB or RAW approx. 7.0 MB)
Write JPEG / RAW image files to CF card
This means that although the buffer can be filled with a continuous burst of nine shots it quickly regains buffer space as the unprocessed images are converted into the JPEG or RAW image files. In a real life situation it's easy to believe that the stage 2 runs concurrently to new unprocessed data being buffered.

Take nine shots in a continuous burst, keep your finger half-pressed on the shutter release and despite the fact that nothing is being written to the CF card you will see the buffer space indicator fairly quickly count back up again. Remove your finger from the shutter release and the counter doesn't change but you can observe data being written to the CF card (indicator light on the CF compartment door flickers).

Repeating this test for both JPEG Large/Fine and RAW I discovered that the buffer has space (without writing any data to the CF card) for:

9 x JPEG Large/Fine images and approx. 4.5 seconds later indicates space to shoot 9 more
9 x RAW images and approx. 8 seconds later indicates space to shoot 6 more
The EOS-10D takes just 500 ms to convert the unprocessed data into a JPEG Large / Fine file, approximately 880 ms to for a compressed RAW file. This also means that the EOS-10D is approximately 30% faster than the EOS-D60 at the image compression stage.
-----

Continuous drive mode
To test continuous mode the camera had the following settings: Manual Focus, Manual Exposure (1/250s, F3.5), ISO 400. No matter what image output format the shooting rate is always 3.3 fps (+/- 0.1 fps). With this in mind we decided to test a different set of parameters:

Next shot - How soon after a burst of nine shots you can take the next
Next burst - How soon after a burst of nine shots you can take another eight
Full write - How long a burst of nine shots takes to be processed and written to the CF
The media used for these tests were:

256 MB Canon High Speed Type I Compact Flash card
512 MB SimpleTech Type I Compact Flash card
1 GB IBM Microdrive Type II Compact Flash card
Burst of nine JPEG images
Timing 256 MB Canon 512 MB SimpleTech 1 GB Microdrive
Next shot 1.1 sec 1.2 sec 1.2 sec
Next burst 6.0 sec 6.0 sec 6.5 sec
Full write 18.7 sec 19.4 sec 18.7 sec

Burst of nine RAW images
Timing 256 MB Canon 512 MB SimpleTech 1 GB Microdrive
Next shot 1.9 sec 1.9 sec 1.9 sec
Next burst 24.2 sec 27.2 sec 24.5 sec
Full write 53.7 sec 63.3 sec 55.0 sec

Because of the increased processing performance of the EOS-10D the 'wait before next burst' (for JPEG) is still six seconds, the same as the EOS-D60 which could buffer only eight images. Also interesting was the performance of the Microdrive, notably better than the same test carried ou on the EOS-D60.