CF card makes any difference?

Sideburns · Jan 14, 2008

nossie said:
LOL@Sideburns

I just looked at the Sandisk 16GB Extreme III and the Sandisk 8GB Extreme III and the 4GB and 2GB that you recommended and guess what... they are all spec'd at 20MB/second sequential read and write. So when you wrote "16GB cards are slow period..." What exactly did you mean? Period.

They're "rated" at that speed. They are not the same speed, though.

Look at any tests that have been done in the real world. smaller cards of the same line perform better.
You don't have to believe me, but go look for yourself. Any legitimate real-world benchmarks show that the 1, 2, 4 gb cards perform better.

bango707 · Jan 14, 2008

bigger cards are totally necessary for shooting long (multiple days or weeks) time lapse. I have filled a 4g card in one shoot and that was in less than 24 hours. Imagine doing something like a flower blooming or a house being constructed. You would need the space for sure.

Garbz · Jan 15, 2008

CF cards will fail with 100% certainty at some point. The technology has a limited re-write count. For the record I have taken over 50000 photos on my old card and it hasn't failed yet. I just upgraded to an eXtreme III since my old EBay fake was too slow when shooting in RAW the buffer would fill up when photographing sports.

nossie · Jan 15, 2008

Sideburns said:
Look at any tests that have been done in the real world.

Well since I actually use the gear in the real world while you spend your time running around the forums professing about it to clock up your post score I kinda don't have to.

Sideburns said:
You don't have to believe me

You are right about that though! -mercifully.

Val · Jan 15, 2008

Alright, i looked through a bunch of benchmarks and the conclusion is that any reasonably fast card will be as fast as anything while shooting on D300 level camera.

Download speeds using card reader are very different.

Failures occur very rarely and if they do almost all the photos can be restored - random sources so not sure about that.

Fate · Jan 15, 2008

I would stick with several 2g fast cards if i were you.

I find it easier to organise that way as well....labeling the cards and stuff.

But the choice is yours!

AmericanJesus · Jan 15, 2008

What about thoose data dumps, the wireless connection from your camera to a harddrive back in the car.

Kipper · Jan 15, 2008

nossie said:
I did have a couple of cards fail on me but it was a batch problem that was fixed. Still though if I'm shooting something important like a wedding I'll use 3 cards in rotation; card 1 take a few shots, rotate to card 2 for a few more shots, then card 3 and back to 1 etc. And I'll do this all day with the idea that if anything happens to any one card then no large block of the days work will be completely lost.
I'm using 3 x 4GB cards and I have a couple of 1 GBs and a 2GB from before.
With the newer cameras saving increasingly larger files all the time I can see the need to upgrade to 8GB or 16Gb cards coming soon enough.

Just a thought - while I think that the above is a good idea, I also think that by doing this you may be hastening the demise of the card as I am guessing the time when it is most likely to fail is when getting constantly inserted and removed?

If I was to shoot that many pictures in one session, I would be tempted by one of the portable hard disks and 2 cards - shoot one til its almost full, back it up while shooting with the other.

Anyway the bottom line is to find a solution that works for you....

nossie · Jan 15, 2008

Kipper said:
Just a thought - while I think that the above is a good idea, I also think that by doing this you may be hastening the demise of the card as I am guessing the time when it is most likely to fail is when getting constantly inserted and removed?

If I was to shoot that many pictures in one session, I would be tempted by one of the portable hard disks and 2 cards - shoot one til its almost full, back it up while shooting with the other.

Anyway the bottom line is to find a solution that works for you....

My biggest concerns on this is the card pulling the pins from the camera as has happened with a cheapo card reader one time.
The purpose of not shooting until a card is almost full is that too much time will have past, lets say the entire church cermony of a wedding. Now if that one card fails then my goose is cooked, but if I rotate them every five mins when appropriate I'll at least have some shots from the church.
The Big Dog high end cameras now include 2 slots that will remove the need for this swapping around.