4x Flash Cards

[todd1664878707]

I am looking at puchasing enough flash cards to get me through a

wedding so I don't have to stop and transfer data on a laptop. I

found an excellent deal on 4x speed flash cards and I was wondering

what your thoughts were on the speed. The 4x cards I found were half

the price (with rebate) of the 40x cards. Right now I'm using 40x

flash cards and the write speed seems excellent. I'm using a D70 and

shooting RAW at weddings. With a RAW file size of about 5.5MB, I

calculate it's going to take about 9 or 10 seconds to write each RAW

image to the card. The D70 has a buffer which stores and holds the

images while they are writing to the card so that the photographer

doesn't have to slow down.

So what are your thoughts on the 4x speed cards? Too slow? Are they

OK?

[smittyatthebeach]

I was kind of sckeptical at first on the difference of the speeds of cards. My first one was a 4x and my new one is a 60x. I notice a huge speed gain. For weddings, the faster the better. It's true you get what you pay for.

[kevin m.]

Speed is addictive; once you've gotten used to it, there's no going back. It's not just the writing speed to the card that's affected. Every time you view the image, check out the histogram, etc., the speed of the card comes into play. 1GB 80X cards are $99 from B&H as of yesterday. I wouldn't use a 4X card for anything but emergencies.

[blueworldstudios]

Look at CF database on robgalbraith.com and look at the various cards. I've found that

that 40x/80x cards don't make that much difference with our cameras (1DmkII). The

SanDisk UltraII was the best price/performance ratio.

 

But, if all you shoot are weddings and your buffer is pretty good, even a slow card could

be fine. With the buffer on the 1D mkII, we can shoot even old, crappy 1x cards without

any issue. When you switch to sports, it can be an issue.

 

For just weddings, I'd rather have 4 4x cards than 2 40x cards.

[wedding-photography-denver]

4x seems too slow to me, but who knows. My slowest cards are Hitachi MD's wich rarely get used these days.

 

If its a paid gig, get what you need, it's worth it.

 

Perhaps the 4x will be fine at the reception ??

[danny_wong2]

Buy one, test it to see if you can live with how slow it is and then go for it or not go for it. The difference might turn out to be significant or not an issue for you.

 

Most likely they are clearing the warehouse.

[jeff_forbes]

Whether the speed of your memory matters depends on your camera. A camera with a smaller buffer, and a slow write speed (300D, for instance) will quickly get to the point where you are waiting for the buffer to clear, but at the same time, the max speed the camera can write the data can be limited. This is the case for older D-SLRs, primarily (D30, D60, 300D, D1). Newer D-SLRS write to memory cards at much higher speeds than older ones, so the fast cards will show a much larger performance advantage (The 20D writes files at over 5MB/second, whereas the 300D writed files at around 1.2MB/second) - so, on the 300D, going from a 4x card (600KB/second) to a 40x card should show about a double in performance when writing images from the buffer to the card. On a 20D, you would see a huge increase in performance.

 

If you have a camera that has a large buffer, relative to the size of the picture (1D or D2H), then you will notice no difference in performance until you fill the buffer, which, in a wedding, with those cameras, is not something that will happen on a regular basis. When the camera needs to clear the buffer, however, you will see a much longer pause than if you had fast memory (Do note that the camera can write from the buffer to the card while you are taking pictures, too, you can just fill the buffer a lot faster than it clears).

 

 

If you don't take rapid fire shots, then the 4x card isn't likely to hurt, however, I'd recommend at least getting a decent card just in case, unless you have a very slow/deliberate style of shooting (When I do candids, I want rapid fire, personally - it wouldn't be an issue with posed portraits, flash, etc, as you will be working slower than the camera)

 

Your specific mentioning of "4x" cards has me thinking that you are focusing on Lexar/Sandisk, as most other companies don't label their cards 4x. Most other companies don't even make 4x cards. Maybe consider buying a different brand, where you can probably get a cheaper card (Rosewill, Transcend, Kingston, PQI are some examples)