compact flash cards - does speed matter?

[joecool]

i'm looking at getting a 256mb cf card for my canon a80. there is a major price premium on the "ultra" cards. it's completely worth it if it really means faster photo capture time, but i really don't care about the speed of downloading to my pc. anybody have any hands-on experience here?

 

[sohcrates]

i have a sandisk 256 ultra II card which i just got. i used to use a 128 meg "regular" viking 128 mb

i have a canon s200...but am looking to buy a digital rebel which is why i'm getting faster cards ready to go

i noticed the camera (my s200) writes considerably faster to the ultra II versus the old viking. so yes, i'd say it's worth it

with a digital rebel in raw format, each pic is like 7 megs, and at that point the difference will be quite noticeable.

 

[MrScott81]

they matter more with digital slr's, but can still make a slight difference.

 

[spidey07]

www.dpreview.com

lots of cameras can't take advantage of the faster cards...but maybe your card reader can.

 

[Anubis]

i dont know about point and shoot cams but on a DSLR like my D70 it doesn the faster cards write that much faster

 

[joecool]

thanks, sohcrates. anybody else have hands-on experience?

 

[joecool]

also, what about manufacturer? i did a quick search on cf reviews and viking "regular" cf seems to perform well (has rebates at amazon), while sandisk normal really stinks. however, a lot of people on amazon give viking a big thumbs down.

 

[pyonir]

I can notice a difference between my Viking card and my Sandisk card on my Canon G3. Especially when using "Continuous Shooting" mode. The Viking card is much faster.

 

[Abhi]

In cameras yes...

In PDA's .. not that much..

 

[Koing]

The difference is about a 'small' in non DSLR cameras.

The problem is other cameras that are non DSLR do not take advantage of the faster CF card speeds. The interface is simply not built to be fast enough. Also people don't expect to be reeling off 3fps contstant for even 2seconds then want to resume without a big delay.

The only difference is between transfer times between a card reader and your computer. BUT if the card reader is slow that will bottle neck that.

With a fast CF card (SanDisk Ultra II, Lexar Pro range) and a FAST CF card you can read up to 12mb a second.

My gf has a D70 and it writes at 4mb a second with a fast card. It can write as slow as 750kb a sec on slower cards.

Simply put the write times are not increased by much on a non optimised camera which is mostly non DSLR types. But you can get faster transfers to your computer.

Koing

 

[Koing]

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

Koing