Continuous shoot buffer limits

[brdy]

The Nikon D7000 has 6fps continuous shoot I have been lead to believe that it can maintain 6fps when shooting 14 bit RAW files. BUT from what I have read the buffer is somewhat limited. According to Camerlabs if the D7000 is set to RAW then the buffer will accept only 10 shots .... at 6fps thats approx 1.5 seconds of action before it drops to 1fps. Set to Large Fine JPEG it is reported to accept 15-20 shots (around 3 seconds) before decelerating to around 1fps. Camera labs claims that even shooting in Large Normal JPEG mode they only managed 30 shots on a Class 10 card.
According to Camerlabs “ Most people quite rightly want to use the maximum speed at the maximum quality - at least for JPEGs. The question then is whether three seconds of coverage at the top speed and JPEG quality is sufficient for your needs. Unfortunately we frequently found the camera stalling around halfway through many action sequences.”
In comparing the D7000 to the continuous shoot rate of the Canon 60D it say
“ It's another example where the initial specifications of the D7000 appeared superior to the Canon EOS 60D, yet in reality its rival will happily shoot over 50 Large Fine JPEGs (of similar file size) at a speed that's only fractionally slower, making it more practical in the field.”

Has anyone here using a D700 experienced frustration with this.

 

[kundalini]

Has anyone here using a D700 experienced frustration with this.

Not me. My D700 is gripped and I use Extreme III cards and shoot RAW. The FPS and buffer write speed has never an issue with me.

 

[brdy]

Thats kewl Kundalini the origina post refers to D7000 not D700

 

[Garbz]

Then the original poster may want to edit his post to fix that last line

It depends on your shooting. Frankly I've done races and sports of all kinds on a slower camera, and at the time using a cheap Chinese memory card which resulted in a pitiful bust as the buffer instantly filled. 6fps is great but if you're shooting off more than a handful of pictures at a time maybe you should learn to watch and predict the sport rather than just sitting with your finger on the trigger. Quite often the interesting part of any action scene lasts about half a second and then there's gaps of uninteresting things in between. This is why the buffer system works so well.

I'm personally beginning to find a lot of professional reviewers these days, people who haven't actually been a photographer and will review on a technical point of view only, the type of people who don't realise that if you haven't got your shot within 20 frames you not going to get it anyway.

 

[brdy]

Oh dear ... my apologies your correct ....last line should read D7000 not D700 .. Thanks both for your reply anyway...

 

[480sparky]

It's simply a case of the powers that be using Madison Avenue tricks. Even set to Basic Jpeg and Small image size, the buffer is 20 shots. I guess I was a little disappointed when I figured it out.

 

[brdy]

480sparky .... Have some info here regards cards... I know very little about all this ...Iam still in the frustration of trying to decide which camera to buy... but have been doing a lot of research and learning stuff ((( smile ))))

As you probably know after the buffer fills ...it must then empty The time it takes to do this varies according to a number of things.. however if you have Auto Distortion set to ON it will results in an r08 buffer capacity no mater what
other settings are selected! (even for small/basic JPEGs) .. The seconds it takes to clear the buffere is of course very much affected by the SD cards used.

quote from tests done by DeanAZ on D7000 discussion forum: Camera set to "RAW 14BIT Lossless A-Dist-OFF": achieved (10 shots)

The Transcend card took 23 seconds to clear the buffer,
the SanDisk Extreme 30MB/s took 9 seconds and
the new 45MB/s UHS-1 card took 7 seconds to totally clear the buffer.

You can see results of his test @ Discussion Forums @ Nikonians - Image Buffer Size and Settings

 

[480sparky]

I shoot with AutoDistortion Off, so that's never been an issue for me.

When I shoot in U1 mode (set for 14-bit RAW+Jpeg fine), I can fire off 10 shots. So dropping down to 8 wouldn'tt be that big of a deal.