COMPACT FLASH MEMORY CARDS

<p>Hey there,<br /> So I'm upgrading to a 5d Mark II and which means I moving from SD to Compact Flash. My question is about the various speeds. Does a faster card really have a benifit or is it just a cash cow for sellers.</p>

<p>What is your experience in there area and what do you use!</p>

<p>One card I am looking at (as a secondary memory) is Patriot 32GB 266X/40mbs $69-$100</p>

<p>Thanks again for your time and answers!</p>

<p>Billy</p>

<p>ps HD Video recording is important.</p>

Your camera will not work faster or produce better images if you purchase a card that is faster than those specified by

Canon for the camera.

 

Dan

<p>Certainly does. My Sandisk Extreme III is a fake card, and is very much slower with my 20D than the legit Ultra II I normally use in it. I don't know haw fast the fake card really is bu it takes a heck of a time to clear the buffer. <br>

That said whether the transfer speeds will really make that much of a difference if the cards are reasonable will depend partially on the camera, and partially on your shooting style. </p>

<p><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=3989561">G Dan Mitchell</a> I think you completely misunderstood what I was asking. I don't expect a super fast card to produce better images. I am asking if there is indeed a benefit to using better faster cards. Like transfer rates, life, reliability. Is it really worth the fuss the sales men make it out to be.</p>

<p>Is it better to go 8gb or 16bg or 32bg. Kind of a don't put your eggs in one basket question.</p>

<p>if you are going to shot video the larger capacity cards are a benefit. however for stills I pick up a handful of 4gb cards - they are less expensive and I dont have my eggs all in one basket. shooting video on my 7D however fills the cards up very quickly.</p>

<p>Faster write speeds on CF cards mean that the camera can empty its buffer faster, up to the speed limit of the card or the camera, whichever it hits first. I use 400x (60MB/Sec) cards in my 7D, and that's been plenty fast enough for its 8 FPS "machine gun" mode on the few occasions I've used that. But 60MB/Sec is just a little more than 2 RAW images per second for the 7D, so there will eventually be a bottleneck there, and the "machine gun" will slow a bit.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, Canon doesn't spec the speed of the camera in writing to the CF card. Probably to avoid problems when folks don't read the manual, and insert a slow card. </p>

<p>As for card size, that seems to always be an issue for discussion these days (Did folks debate 20-exposure vs 36-exposure rolls of 35mm?). Larger cards are cheaper per Gigabyte than smaller cards, so you can take home more images on one card for less money. <a href="http://www.birdsasart.com/">Art Morris</a> posted an interesting take on card size in "<a href="http://www.birdsasart-blog.com/2011/04/08/why-32-gb-flash-cards-why-delkin-e-film-pro/">Why 32-gb Flash Cards?</a>". I tend to agree with him. Modern electronics are VERY reliable, and failures <em>due to manufacturing</em> are most likely to show up in the first few uses. Any card can fail, and no matter whether you use one 128 GB card, or a pocket full of 4 GB cards (odds are the image you really want/need was on the failed one anyway). If your livelihood depends on the photos, then the more cards you spread a particular job across, the better off you are, obviously, but for myself, shooting for the pleasure of it, the larger issue is the bottom line cost of a card at the time of purchase. Right now, I use an 8GB and a 16GB, so I am out a max of over 500 RAW images (and many, many more if I save JPEGs), should the 16 fail at the wrong time! Certainly enough to put a damper on my day, but I'll get past it.</p>

<p>That said, if I were changing formats, and I had available cash for either one large card or two half-size cards, I'd probably opt for the two half-size cards. Just in case... </p>

<p>What Mark said...</p>

<p>I use Ultra II CF cards (30 MB/s) in my 5D2 and it works fine for HD video and bursts of stills. If you have a fast card reader, the higher spec cards will upload a lot faster. Of course you need a FW800 reader to benefit from the speed (or maybe a USB3 reader if their speed pans out). Otherwise waiting to dump a couple 8 or 16 GB cards is a real PITA.</p>

<p>I also use Sandisk Ultras (30MB/s). I notice no real difference when shooting HD video using Ultras vs older Sandisks (I have 8GB Ultras as well as an older 4GB card). I have found that the real benefit is when transferring files to my hard drive. It is very much quicker with my Ultras.</p>

<p>Cheap Kingston 32GB CF card. Paid £50 for it 2 years ago. Never let me down in my 5D2 and the 1080p video writes to it nicely without any buffering problems.</p>

<p>Here's a comparison of various CF cards in a 5D MK II</p>

<p>http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9784</p>

 

<p>I use the Lexar Professional 400x (60mb/sec) 8 gig cards in my 1D3 and 1DS3 cameras. (Neither camera has video capability so I can't comment there). This seems to be the fastest card my cameras can make use of. They have proven reliable and typically the Lexar cards seem to be a few dollars less than a comparable Sandisk. I have NEVER used cards other than Sandisk or Lexar. As others have stated using a faster card than your camera can use will only get you faster downloads to your computer. That said, I noticed a slight improvement when going from a 30 mb/sec card to the Lexar 60 mb/sec card. I got 2 or 3 more RAW burst shots on the 1DS3 before the camera would stop from a full buffer. The biggest improvement was faster downloads to my computer's built-in USB-2 card reader.</p>

<p>Awesome thanks for the info everyone! Very helpful!</p>

<p>I use Sandisk Extreme III 8 GB cards (30 MB/s), my friend uses UDMA enabled cards.</p>

<p>I get around 9 frames of RAW + JPEG before the frame rate slows to a crawl. He can hold the shutter and keep going.</p>

<p>I bought a 3 pack of the Extreme III cards for less than he paid for two of his. The minor reduction in performance does not hinder my shooting style at all. I went with the extreme version to gain a little in environmental latitude since I like to shoot in the outdoors; he is mostly a studio shooter.</p>

<p>William Squire asked: <em>"Does a faster card really have a benifit or is it just a cash cow for sellers."</em></p>

<p>I replied: "<em>Your camera will not work faster or produce better images if you purchase a card that is faster than those specified by Canon for the camera."</em></p>

<p>William Squire replied: "<em><a rel="nofollow" href="../photodb/user?user_id=3989561">G Dan Mitchell</a> I think you completely misunderstood what I was asking. I don't expect a super fast card to produce better images. I am asking if there is indeed a benefit to using better faster cards. Like transfer rates, life, reliability. Is it really worth the fuss the sales men make it out to be.</em>"</p>

<p>I'm tempted to reply: "<em>Huh?"</em></p>

<p>I'll suppress that and instead write:</p>

<ul>

<li><em>"Like transfer rates..." </em>- Maybe but probably not. If you have a significantly faster card, get an unusually fast external card reader, transfer truly huge numbers of files on a frequent basis... you might save some seconds perhaps. More likely you'll never notice a difference.</li>

<li><em>"life..." - </em>No</li>

<li><em>"reliability." </em>- No</li>

<li><em>"Is it really worth the fuss the sales men make it out to be."</em> - No</li>

</ul>

<p>Seeing this type of question frequently in these forums and knowing that the reason for the question almost always has to do with the notions that a faster card will improve camera performance (and this has come up in the other replies in this thread) or that some brands will be more reliable than others, those two issues are worth addressing.</p>

<ul>

<li>As long as your card meets the required specifications for your camera, a faster card will not "empty the buffer faster" or otherwise speed up camera operation. The cameras internal bandwidth is the limiting factor as long as you have a fast enough card, and a faster card can not improve that.</li>

<li>There is no evidence that more expensive, brand name cards are any more reliable than generic cards from reputable vendors. Memory cards are essentially commodity items at this point in time, not objects of artisanal brilliance.</li>

</ul>

<p>Looking back at my earlier reply, it seems relevant to your question. May I also suggest that when when someone takes the time to reply to your question in this forum that beginning your response to their offer of useful information with "<em>I think you completely misunderstood what I was asking" </em>might not be the best thing.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<p>By the way, the arguments for multiple small cards over one large capacity card are not as simple or compelling as some would have you believe.</p>

<p>It is true that given the extremely low likelihood that you will have a "card failure," it is true that when one card fails the other will not likely fail at the same time. However...</p>

<p>There is not evidence that, say, 32GB cards fail at a significantly higher rate than, say, 16GB cards or, as far as I know, that there is any difference in failure rate correlated to card size at all. However, the more cards you own, the more likely that one of them will fail given whatever the projected failure rate is for individual cards. (I repeat that card failures are actually quite rare.) If you own two cards, there is twice the likelihood that you will experience a card failure. (Note that I'm not suggesting that owning two increases the odds that a particular card will fail, just that if you own multiples that there is a greater chance that you will experience one of your cards failing.)</p>

<p>But that's not all. While a spontaneous internal failure of the card itself is one concern, there are other modes of failure related to the use of CF cards. For example, cards can be lost, dropped, stepped on, submerged in water and so forth. All of these are, obviously, more likely when the cards are removed/inserted and when they are handled and stored. (You aren't likely to lose or drop or step on the card when it is in the camera...)</p>

<p>Another card-related failure - and a very serious one - is bent pins in the card slot produced by misaligning the card when inserting it. It is more likely that you'll bend pins in a card reader - since many of them are not all that solidly constructed - and this could, in some cases, leave you with a broken pin stuck in the card and rendering it unusable. (The good news is that you probably would have gotten your images off the card first, but that's not certain.) However, the pins in the camera card slot can be bend or broken as well, and this will render the entire camera inoperable until you send it in for repair.</p>

<p>The point is that the question of what is the most reliable approach is not as simple or one-sided as some would have you believe. (There is another background points as well - you can never eliminate all potential risks. With film you might have accidentally mis-engaged the film sprockets, etc. and managed to lose images in that or other interesting ways.)</p>

<p>If overall card reliability is the most important thing to you, I argue that that in the vast majority of cases it is probably fine, and in some ways better, to get one large card and simply leave it in the camera.</p>

<p>Dan</p>

<p>I suppose I should add to my comment above that my friend and I both shoot 5D MK IIs. Video is just fine with my slower cards.</p>

<p>HD video at 1920 X 1080 is approximately 330 MB/min at 30p/25p/24p according to the manual. So then 330/60 = about 5.5 MB/s for HD video. An Ultra II at 15 MB/s will meet the video requirements of the 5D MK II. A bigger consideration imho is file size w/ video.</p>

<p>15 minutes of 1080P HD video at 330 MB/m is almost 5 GB of data.</p>

<p>Billy, in real world testing, my own, I have not noticed any real difference in 200x or 400x cards.</p>

<p>To be specific, my current, main CF cards are a Lexar 16gb 200x(30 MB/s) and a SanDisk Extreme 32gb 400x(60 MB/s) card. Both are used in 7d and 40d cameras. Almost the same upload speeds, when using USB 2.0 readers too. No problems with either card in 7d when it is shooting video. When shooting stills, both cards clear the 7d and 40d buffers at the same time. Even my older SanDisk Extreme III 4gb 200x(30 MB/s) cards act the same as my newer larger capacity cards do.</p>

<p>Of course, if a faster FW800 , esata, or USB 3.0 readers were used, then the 400x card would make a difference in upload speeds!</p>

<p>Upload speed never a problem for me following a 450 frame theatre shoot. I just get the various folders uploading onto the computer and then go and put the kettle on. One cup of tea later and they're just about finishing!</p>

<p>Mr Mitchell's comments are pretty much right on the money regarding card size. If a 32Gb card could hold ~3200 frames on my venerable 20D, let's call it 100 rolls of film in old money. Highly unlikely to fail whilst in the camera and even if the card had a 0.1% failure rate it would still have run the equivalent of 100 000 rolls of film through it. I have my doubts that any mechanical systems had to achieve that in the past (cameras I mean) The shutter is supposed to go long before then anyway as it would have had 3.2 million activations! eeek.</p>

<p>So my guess is that reliability has gone up overall (and yes, I appreciate that if a 32G card did fail you'd lose potentially an awful lot all at once)</p>

<p>Regards,<br>

Damian</p>

<p>Wow, how'd this become about size vs. speed? oh well</p>

<p>My 2 cents is that you should get the max speed you can reasonably afford. I've been using 133x cards for the last three years and am about to upgrade to 600x 90 mb/s UDMA cards. Even though your current camera may get no benefit from the max read/write capacity of the card, maybe your next one will. </p>

<p>Also, you should be careful about selecting the card you choose to buy, a lot of time, 2nd tier manufacturers (patriot, transcend, etc.) will publish a great 'x' number (like 400x or 600x), and only by reading the fine print is it apparent <strong><em>that their read & write speeds are completely different </em></strong>for example a 400x UDMA transcend card I just saw has a <em>90mb/s<strong> read</strong> and 60mb/s <strong>write</strong></em> speed.<br>

The Patriot card you originally posted has in it's tech specs "UDMA 5 Read Speed: 40MB/s PIO6 Read Speed: 26MB/s" but <strong><em>no write speed listed</em></strong>. That should be a red flag! When I'm doing 20-30mb RAWs @ 3-4 fps (on the 5dmk2) write speed DOES matter! <br>

I definetly believe in getting the largest, fastest single card you can afford, but you should be careful about the reputability of the manufacturer... And pay attention to the details.</p>