Is the shots remaining counter really conservative in different cameras?

<p>I am looking for more memory for an upcoming trip. My D200 with a 4GB card says I will get 450 shots. The most I ever shot in one stretch was 384 files on JPEG fine for 1.54 GB. This should mean that my counter is really conservative.</p>

<p>I don't feel like popping off this many shots right now for an experiment so can you give me an idea of how many shots I should really be getting with a 4GB card at JPEG fine. If it's considerably more than 450, I might not even need to buy more memory.</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

<p>Both my previous DSLR (D70) and my current D2X and D300 had/have about 40% more space available than indicated by the counter. Can't speak for the D200.</p>

<p>Is the counter just conservative or are you compromising the card and pictures if you go over the recommended number of remaining shots.</p>

<p>The only time the counter is going to be accurate is if you shoot uncompressed RAW - in all other cases, since the files will be compressed and the amount of compression will vary depending on the what is in the image, the camera will just give an estimate - and it is always fairly conservative. It also depends on whether you have set JPEG compression to "size priority" or "optimal quality" - for the latter, the JPEG image file size can be up to 80% larger. For size priority, Nikon assumes in the manual a 4.8MB size for JPEG Large Fine - so you would get about 660 images on a 4GB card; and that is still a conservative estimate. From your example above, you could have gotten close to a 1000 images on that card. I don't shoot JPEG, so I can't give you a definitive answer - from shooting compressed RAW, I usually get about twice as many shots as initially indicated.</p>

<p>I hardly ever leave home with less than four 4GB SanDisk Ultra II cards in reserve when I use my D200 - these cards are a few years old and at the time cost some $30 or thereabouts at Costco.</p>

<p>Couldn't edit anymore: The D200 doesn't write much faster with the newer cards available today - so a 30MB/s card is all you really need for use in a D200. Believe that is the slowest speed available today - and the D200 won't even write any faster than 10MB/s.</p>

<p>It's a conservative estimate - even when shooting uncompressed raw. For instance, with a newly formatted 4GB card in my D700, it says "155". This is after I copied the 236 images from it, and the camera display said I still had room for 14.</p>

<p>A faster card may not result in better performance in your camera. However a faster card may download faster if you use an high speed card reader. I get 30-32 MB/s from Sandisk Extreme (60 MB/s) cards, compared to 6-10 MB/s from older Sandisk Ultra (20 MB/s) cards, using a Sandisk Firewire reader and uncompressed RAW files from a Nikon D3.</p>

<p>Shooting jpg fine on a D300, my 'shots remaining' counter reads 369. I typically get around 550-600, sometimes slightly more, on one 4 gb card.</p>