What difference does CF speed make?

yvonne

HI,

I use a Canon10d and mainly shoot large JPGs and I'm thinking I really should be shooting RAW. I'm also planning to upgrade to the 20d soon, and hence will have even more requirement for bigger chips. Looking at the huge range on the market and the huge price difference for what is apparently the same product, my question is:

Is the difference write speed on a big (2gb upward) CF cards really very noticeable, or does it really only become an issue if you're doing sports photos and stuff like that?

How much difference does it really make? Is it worth the extra money? Or is this a "how long is a piece of string" question?

Is it a case of you get what you pay for? Should I buy the fastest card I can afford? Oh, and any particular cards you think are great and you would recommnet?

Thanks, Yvonne.

Nikolai

Just my $.02
Yvonne,
speed difference can be pretty substantial, but it only matters if you
a) have USB2, Firewireor any other fast way to download your pictures from your camera, and you always getting impatient during this process
b) you shoot a lot of actions OR use a lot of bursts/bracketing. However, your particular camera has a nice buffer, so it should not be that big of a difference.
HTH

wxwax

Agreed, as long as your camera has a decent size buffer, and you don't shoot in "burst mode" you don't need the fastest of the fastest. But I would look for at least 40x write speed (or Ultra II on the Sandisk cards.) IMHO the download speed is less of an issue, as it doesn't affect camera performance.

ian408

CF speed matters not so much downloading to your computer but
writing the images from the camera's buffer to the memory card.

Regardless of your camera, you want to write the CF as fast as the
camera can empty it's buffer to maximize the number of pics you can
take in rapid succession.

If you don't shoot high burst modes, then buying an 80x card is probably
not worth the extra cost (when compared to a 40x card). I'd also argue that
for most of us, the difference between 40x and 80x is probably more
marketing than necessity.

Here is a link to Rob G.'s CF database.

Ian

Shay Stephens

With the 10D I find that the speed of the card doesn't make much difference. The speed bottleneck is in the camera's ability to write to the card. I use the Sandisk Ultra II 1gb cards. What really made the difference was in using the 20D. It can write much faster to the cards. Just yesterday I used some slow cards in the 20D and it felt like I was using the 10D, the speed difference was very noticable.

yvonne

Thanks guys, that's very helpful.

ubergeek

CF write speed
The difference between a "fast" card and a "slow" card depends largely on the camera. The 10D is relatively slow with pretty much all cards, but the 20D can benefit tremendously from a faster card. Rob Galbraith maintains a database of flash memory performance with various cameras (including the 10D and 20D): http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

The Sandisk Ultra II is not the cheapest card around (street price of around $85 for a 1GB card) but it performs near the top of the charts on a number of cameras. Sandisk Extreme and Lexar 80X cards also generally perform very well.

A fast card can make a noticeable difference if you have a tendency to squeeze off a number of frames in a short amount of time (e.g. using the continuous-shooting mode for sporting events). If you don't do this sort of thing very often, you probably won't notice the difference between a faster card and a slower one. But given that the aforementioned Sandisk Ultra II costs only some $20 more than the cheapest 1GB card that Froogle turned up, I would probably be willing to pay the difference "just in case" I never needed the performance.

Cheers,
Jeremy