Memory Card Advice

[davidedric]

I never use higher than 16GB and have dozens, never put all your eggs in one basket.

True, but just because you have a big card doesn't mean you have to fill it before changing. Serious point intended.

Dave

[Mito]

Mike,
A highly unscientific test would be to stand in the street, or rather pavement, and either photograph a passing car by panning or cars passing in general but with finger firmly pressing the shutter button. Picture quality is not important, it's the capacity of the buffer and card you are testing. The only difference between a car and animal is that a car has wheels not legs.
Have a good holiday

[Mike Buckley]

Thank you to everyone for your help!

After reading all of the posts again, I locked in on the information provided by Andrew explaining that the card can be far faster than the capability of the cameras. He posted dpReview's information about our D7000 so I also looked up their information about our D5100, which proved to be even more helpful. It explains:

"The D5100 is the second camera we've encountered that is supposed to be able to take advantage of the latest SDXC with UHS-I (ultra-high speed) interfaces, the first being the D7000. The D5100's lower shooting rate of 4fps means that our conventional Class 6 SDHC was able to keep up with much of what the camera was able to throw at it but the faster SDXC card was able to improve the 'buffer full' rate by a fraction (around 0.2fps) when shooting Raw files.

The UHS-I standard [I think that is supposed to be SDXC but it doesn't matter] is designed to allow cards with write speeds of up to 104MB/s, rather than the 45MB/s of the SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I we've conducted this test with. Based on this comparison between SDHC and UHS-I SDXC cards, we can't see them offering much benefit to D5100 owners."

When I looked at the availability of various cards and their prices at companies that I regularly do business with, I settled on the Sandisk Extreme 16GB SDHC Class 10 UHS1 with a write speed of 60 MB/s. It was available at B&H at $40 for a pack of 2 cards with free shipping. That card's capabilities exceed the writing speed of my current cameras and probably for any future cameras we might own in the next ten years.

Thanks again to everyone!

[SteveF]

Mike, next stop will be a faster card reader to match the speed of the new cards, if you haven't got one and then a new computer to cope with all the new files, better start from scratch again then ...

[Mike Buckley]

Too funny, Steve. I only use the card reader built into the computer and couldn't care less about how long it takes to transfer the image files to the computer. But thanks for your interest in spending my money for me.

[Wayland]

I looked into this matter when I bought my 6D and received this answer from Canon UK on the matter:


Dear Mr. Waidson,


Thank you for your request and for contacting Canon.


In reference to your enquiry on the EOS 6D please be advised that we are not provided with the information on the exact write speed from the camera to the card but it is correct that the fastest cards available are not always the best choice looking at the costs.


In the SD/SDHC/SDXC range any speed Class will work, from 2 to 10, but budget-wise a Speed Class 6 card would be sufficient enough to fully use the write speed capabilities of the EOS 6D.


Yours sincerely,


Cheryl Meredith
Canon Services & Support


This seems to be confirmed by my own tests which indicate identical performance between a borrowed Sandisk Extreme Pro 32gb card costing £64 and an Extreme 32gb card costing £39 from the same supplier.


This reply from Canon would indicate that I also could expect exactly the same performance from a Sandisk Ultra 32gb card costing just £27. Less than half the cost of the card that a casual glance at the card manufacturers advertising hype would suggest that I needed to "Never miss the moment.."


Of course the read speed is slower but I have never missed a picture because my desktop computer could not read the card fast enough and I have never been so impatient that I couldn't find something else to do while LightRoom worked away in the background.


In fact, as I always copy and convert my RAW files to DNG format when I upload them I can be fairly confident that the card speed is not the bottleneck at that point either.

[CP140]

I would think that a card that is slightly faster than the camera would be the optimum... what that magic number is, of course, anyone's guess.

Just for the heck of it, I dug out an antiquated 128MB card I've had since the days of my HP Pocket PC and compared it to a newer class 6 card. Shooting a more or less identical frame on two identical bodies both in RAW, the old card (with no rating on it) takes FOREVER before the red LED indicating write in progress goes out.

It would be very interesting to know what speed the camera (any camera) is capable of writing to the card and then being able to pick the next fastest card. Sadly, manufacturers seem to regard those sort of things as classified information....