Sandisk Memory Cards

[Kayaker72]

Sorry that this post was blank for awhile, I am having trouble posting from IE again.


Also, it looks like Bryan has now posted this under News, but started this thread because I had noticed on canonrumors a report that B+H had lower prices on their Sandisk memory cards. It appears that amazon has similar prices (some are still higher).


My fastest card is a 60 MB/s UDMA card, so the 90 MB/s UDMA 6 Extreme Pro is tempting.


Thanks,


Brant

[neuroanatomist]

My fastest card is a 60 MB/s UDMA card, so the 90 MB/s UDMA 6 Extreme Pro is tempting.

Agreed. I also top out at the 60 MB/s UDMA. Can anyone with a 7D or 1D IV speak whether there's a noticeable difference in shooting performance (not concerned about transfer to computer) with the 90 MB/s vs 60 MB/s? It's a non-issue on the 5DII but might be an issue on the 1D X...


Thanks!


--John

[HDNitehawk]

Can anyone with a 7D or 1D IV speak whether there's a noticeable difference in shooting performance

If no one chimes in and gives you an awnser, if I have a 60mb card I can check this later at home. Most of my cards are Hoodmans and are 100mbs, but I have some other cards that should be slower.


I would think that the only effect would be how fast the camera recovers after a burst in RAW format, how long it takes the busy signal to drop so you can take a few more frames. Actually it could be a bigger issue on the 5DII since you have larger files and smaller burst rate. I can tell you that the 1D IV recovers much faster than the 5D II using equal cards.


I had always heard thatyou do not need the faster cardunless your shooting video.

[bob williams]

Can anyone with a 7D or 1D IV speak whether there's a noticeable difference in shooting performance

Definitely YES, using the 90 mb/s cards, I have notice a significant difference in the buffer lag. with the 30's I could pop off 5 or 6 shots before the buffer lag would slow everything down, with the 90's it seems to be about double----If shooting Jpeg---it screams, I don't think I have ever hit the full buffer mode shooting Jpegs. Recently, I have been shooting football, and will sometimes shoot a sequence through out the entire play, maybe 10-15 seconds worth, but no lag. In my opinion they are definitely worth $65 bucks for a 16 gig90mb/s. Also, I have never had a Sandisk fail on me (Knocking on wood).


My 2cw

[neuroanatomist]

Thanks, Rick and Bob. All my CF cards are 60 MB/s. While the $60 price for the 90 MB/s is reasonable, I don

[Kayaker72]

Yep, thanks Rick and Bob.


I have a 30 MB/s Sandisk Extreme III card and a 60 MB/s Sandisk Extreme card. I just did a test and both shot 24 RAW files at the same manual settings before slowing down. But, almost perfectly, the 7D spent ~10 seconds writing the 24 shots to the 60 MB/s card and 21 seconds to write the same number of shots to the 30 MB/s card. The files are approximately 20 MB, so it appears the 60 MB/s card writes at ~48 MB/s and the 30 MB/s card writes at ~23 MB/s.


So, it seems that the benefit is in shooting beyond 24 shots....But as I have never done that prior to this test, I don't think I need a 90 MB/s card. Granted, I may get a 16 GB card and may spend the extra $10 just in case I do someday need the speed.

[Kayaker72]

Rick,

Sure...
http://www.slashgear.com/high-perfor...rk-iv-1577718/

Unfortunately it seems a lot was lost in the move, but I have to say, I do like this new forum.

Brant

[HDNitehawk]

Brant

Thanks, I was talking to Hoodman today, and I was trying to direct him to that website but didn't have the link.

[Dr Croubie]

Thought I'd throw my own results in here, even though I've only got 2 cards the same speed and one 7D body.

70-300L, 70mm, f/5.6, iso100, 1/125s, pointed at a white wall. TC-80N3 set to 20s-long 'bulb', but camera set to HSC. Fully charged battery, cards formatted in-camera. Firmware 1.2.3.
ALO off, PIC off, all noise reductions off. I didn't time the length of the "busy" light or the red "write"-light afterwards

8GB Sandisk Extreme 60MB/s card, RAW-only: 68 frames, 1.2GB (1,304,866,608 bytes).
16GB Sandisk Extreme 60MB/s card, RAW-only: 69 frames, 1.2GB (1,324,110,624 bytes).
a) that's a good result, because I bought my 16GB card in hong kong for the same price as the 8 in Holland (ie, it's genuine or at least a good-speed ripoff).
b) Not sure why the 8GB missed its last frame, maybe because I forgot to format it but did format the 16GB?
c) viewfinder says 16 images possible, but I get 22 before the slowdown to bursts-of-2 roughly every second.
d) 18MB per .CR2 file.

8GB card, RAW+LJPG: 56 frames, 1,240,964,468 bytes.
16GB card, RAW+LJPG: 57 frames, 1,262,978,180 bytes.
a) again the 16GB gets one more frame in (both formatted in-camera pre-test this time).
b) viewfinder says 6 possible shots, but I get 8 before the slowdown.
c) I always thought that the jpg-processing overhead wasn't much, seems I lose ~60MB over a 20 second burst, ~3MB/s slower.
d) 18MB CR2, 3MB JPG or so.

8GB card, LJPG-only: 153 frames, 435,550,489 bytes.
16GB card, LJPG-only: 153 frames, 429,442,384 bytes.
a) size difference was about 2 JPGs-worth, but same amount of frames.
b) Viewfinder said 96 shots available, but absolutely no slowdown in 20 seconds. Should i add more to my shutter-count to see how many JPGs I can get before a slowdown?
c) 2.7MB per JPG or so.

For the hell of it, I found an old 512MB "Pretec 80x" card that i've been using as an IDE drive in a firewall (built from an old pentium 1 using ipcop) for a few years and recently upgraded.
RAW: 20 frames or so, then 2 second wait, frame, 2 seconds, frame, 5 seconds, frame, then Full CF (maybe missed out on one frame in the end). 25 frames, 476,331,819 bytes.
RAW+JPG: still get 8 frames before the slowdown, then a few bursts of 1 or 2, a 5-second wait, 1 shot, a 5 second wait, then the 20-seconds is up. The "writing" led doesn't go out for about a minute or two afterwards, I thought I'd broken my camera. 20 frames in total, 440,834,628 bytes.
JPG: 13-seconds before a slowdown, then a few bursts of 1 or 2 frames each. 113 frames, 315,670,763 bytes.

The results for the crap-card are interesting in that you get an idea of the performance of the buffer. ie, I still got nearly the same number of frames before the slowdown in all but LJPG, but once the slowdown started, the camera's nearly unusable for 2 minutes.

[Kayaker72]

Dr. Croubie....I like your results and I think they highlight one of the things I've learned doing the testing. I think the burst number of shots shown in the viewfinder only reflects the images that can be written to the buffer but does not account for images being cleared from the buffer during shooting. In otherwords, the number of shots you can take until the buffer is full is the buffer size/image size + write rate * time/image size, or, for the 7D, the 15 Images the viewfinder says plus the extra 7-8 images that can be written in 3 seconds of shooting (with a fast enough card) equals the 22-24 burst images we've seen in our test results.

Speaking of the test results, I wanted to summarize those that were conducted using the same methodology and I assume John/Neuro will repost his table....



Rick and Rich, please let me know if you would like me to modify in any way....

Thanks,
Brant