CF cards - which is faster?

[kiasu101]

I was taking firework shots that night at Marina using my canon 30D and 2GB Kingston elite Pro 50X. It took me about 13 sec to write to card after bulb exposure time of 5 seconds before I could take the next firework. Is this considered slow?

Thinking of getting a faster card like the kingston 2GB 133X ultimate. Will it give marked improvement? The price of that card in Best Bargain is $50.70.

My friend has a sandisk ultra II, he said it is much faster. Is he correct? How fast is his compared to 133X?

Thanks..

 

[ExplorerZ]

u must be kidding 13sec...

anyway i think ur NR is turned on, try turning off... sld take only less than 2-3s to write even on slowest card

 

[zac08]

I was taking firework shots that night at Marina using my canon 30D and 2GB Kingston elite Pro 50X. It took me about 13 sec to write to card after bulb exposure time of 5 seconds before I could take the next firework. Is this considered slow?

Thinking of getting a faster card like the kingston 2GB 133X ultimate. Will it give marked improvement? The price of that card in Best Bargain is $50.70.

My friend has a sandisk ultra II, he said it is much faster. Is he correct? How fast is his compared to 133X?

Thanks..

I'm not sure about Kingston as I kinda find it slower than the rest in terms of speed on specs alone... thus I'd stick to Sandisk or other brands intead like Lexar

 

[dan_1337]

Have a read of this website:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

Maps the speed of every card and every camera.

 

[sammy888]

I was taking firework shots that night at Marina using my canon 30D and 2GB Kingston elite Pro 50X. It took me about 13 sec to write to card after bulb exposure time of 5 seconds before I could take the next firework. Is this considered slow?

Thinking of getting a faster card like the kingston 2GB 133X ultimate. Will it give marked improvement? The price of that card in Best Bargain is $50.70.

My friend has a sandisk ultra II, he said it is much faster. Is he correct? How fast is his compared to 133X?

Thanks..

I agree with ExplorerZ that you have NR mode switched on. That is what is slowling down your camera from saving to your CF. If you are not sure what NR is....well it has to do with Noise Reduction and using that built-in feature found in your camera. Instead of doing this at home on your PC you are using your camera to do it for you after each shot you took. You can set your camera to do automatically "cleaning up" of some grainy noise for shots you took with shutter speed of 1 second or longer.

The longer the shutter speed, the more work and time it needs for the camera's built-in hardware to post-process the picture you just shot. Your camera can not multi-task hor heheh... so you are left standing there waiting for it to finish. So best to switch off NR mode.

There really is no reason for you to think your CF card is slow. ( I have a card that I bought almost 3 yrs ago that is still doing fine. never a problem with saving to the card) What some people don't 100% understand about memory card speed and your camera like my Nikon D70 for example is this. Most people will NOT benefit from a faster card when you are SHOOTING ...how often do you shoot super fast multi exposure shots like 3-5 frames per second or even more frames without stopping???!!!

If you like friing non stop ..capturing like 15 to 20 or more frames non stop then maybe...jit will help in some way.

You have to remember another thing... YOUR DSLR ( as far as I know about Nikon and Canon) has a built-in memory BUFFER...meaning it is able to save to a fast buffer in the camera prior to saving it to your CF card and it can buffer quite a few shots before you overflood it completelywhile you are shooting.

So as you can see most of us don't really benefit from faster card in NORMAL shooting condition. The real benefit of a faster CF card or whatever card in the market is that...once you are finished with your shooting or used up the capacity of the card...that SPEED advantage of your card makes the difference in downloading speed from itself to your PC. That is where the faster speed cards really shine and make the difference and that is why you pay more for them.

To me that is how I see it lah.

 

[Henessy]

I am using kingston ultimate. It is quite fast for me. Heard from my friends that Sandisk Ultra and extreme series are faster.

Not sure whether it is true though

 

[Henessy]

To add on, even if your card is very fast, if your camera writing speed cannot support it, it is useless to buy it.

Just my 2 cents

 

[metallilan]

To add on, even if your card is very fast, if your camera writing speed cannot support it, it is useless to buy it.

Just my 2 cents

Well, if the fast card is couple with a fast card reader than data transfer to the pc will be abit faster

Personally my Kingston Ultimate CF has probably less glitches and bumps than the Sandisk Ultra II that i currently have. My Sandisk will occasionally give me the CHA error when i shoot... prob a prob with my card tho, since it never happens on my Kingston.