CF Card Question

tjl1388

I am shooting a D300 with either a 24-70 2.8 or 70-200 2.8 and shoot 90% fast moving sports..football, competitive cheerleading etc.

I am looking into upgrading my CF cards from 2-4gb to 8gb's.

My question is this.. I am CONSTANTLY bouncing off the write/buffer of my D300. The CF cards I am looking at have some crazy write speeds 60mb/s etc. How fast does the camera send it out? Will I notice a big difference in how fast I can be back at full speed?

ziggy53

Best data about Nikon D300 card write speeds is here:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9254

The fastest cards will indeed make "some" difference in how long it takes to clear out the shot buffer, but many times a larger capacity card is actually slower than a smaller card of the same technology.

Note that RAW write-out speeds are different than JPG write-out speeds.

Qarik

tjl1388 wrote:

I am shooting a D300 with either a 24-70 2.8 or 70-200 2.8 and shoot 90% fast moving sports..football, competitive cheerleading etc.

I am looking into upgrading my CF cards from 2-4gb to 8gb's.

My question is this.. I am CONSTANTLY bouncing off the write/buffer of my D300. The CF cards I am looking at have some crazy write speeds 60mb/s etc. How fast does the camera send it out? Will I notice a big difference in how fast I can be back at full speed?

big difference? unlikely unless you are using really slow cards vs really fast cards...then you may see a modest difference. Switching from RAW to jpeg will net you a huge difference.

borrowlenses.com

You'll see a difference from generic to Sandisk Extreme IV for example. However the capacity of the card has no impact on performance (in a positive way at least). If you want the fastest cards out there go UDMA.

This might help too: http://sportsphotoguy.com/all-about-cf/

tjl1388

Thanks everyone for the great info.

Photoskipper

I found the 8G Extreme IV is much faster than the 4G Extreme III and 1G Extreme II. The difference is more obvious when I take the RAW on 5D FF body.