slow camera or SD card

[neit]

I have an old P&S camera (Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ2) with a 1gb "viking interworks" SD card. It seems to take too long to save an image before I can shoot again. I know the card is old but I wanted to make sure it was the bottleneck.

Pictures were 1280x960 jpegs and weigh in between 400-600 kb each. I downloaded crystaldiskmark and ran 100mb file test on it with the following result:




The sequential write seems plenty high, and based on googling that is the important factor for a camera. I don't have a spare to test with, but would a new SD card remedy it or do I need to do some more troubleshooting on the camera?


Link to the camera: http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-DMC-.../dp/B0007OV45Y

 

[GoSharks]

I doubt a new SD card would drastically improve things.

 

[fralexandr]

how long does it take to save the image?
have you formatted the SD card?
windows' formatting tool sometimes doesn't work properly
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_3/

 

[AkumaX]

SD cards are cheap, wouldn't hurt to try another one.

 

[Syborg1211]

How slow is slow? Has it always been slow or is this new behavior? Try turning down the picture size and image quality and see if it improves. If it doesn't, then it's likely an issue with the camera.

 

[neit]

Hi, just an update. I got my hands on a microsd card with adapter with the following crystalmark scores:




However performance wise it's still the same, I count about 5 full seconds before my screen comes back and I can take another picture. Perhaps the camera has seen it's glory days behind it...

Just to make sure, I am interested in sequential write speed, in which case it's 3x faster, but the random writes aren't significantly different

 

[jtvang125]

Are you shooting in a special mode? I know on mine there are some modes that takes 3-4 seconds for the camera to analyze the shot before letting you shoot again.

If it's not doing any extra analysis of the shot then it sounds like it's the camera because just about all cameras have a buffer. If you never shoot fast enough to fill this buffer the camera will allow you to keep taking additional shots without waiting.

 

[Madwand1]

You got a much faster card, and it didn't improve, so you know it's not the card, and 5s is too long for the write time to be the bottleneck.

Is the flash used for your test pictures? That alone puts the cycle time to ~4s, which could be longer with aging batteries.

You should be able to get it down to ~2s without flash, as per the following article. If not, try changing the settings?

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasoniclz2/4

 

[neit]

You got a much faster card, and it didn't improve, so you know it's not the card, and 5s is too long for the write time to be the bottleneck.

Is the flash used for your test pictures? That alone puts the cycle time to ~4s, which could be longer with aging batteries.

You should be able to get it down to ~2s without flash, as per the following article. If not, try changing the settings?

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasoniclz2/4

Ding ding ding!

I just turned the flash off and have the original card in there, time between pictures is about one second, but I can't really be more accurate than that. I'll try fresh batteries for the flash, but it's a relief since I know it'll be tolerable during the day when I don't need a fill!