Just asking around, does anyone pays attention to the speed of how fast the picture gets written into the memory card ? If it does, how fast is fast for the picture to get written? :blink:

Coz when I was doing night shots the other time, I noticed that after the closing of the shutter, it takes quite a while (about >30sec) for the picture to get read into the CF card.. it shows as 150kb/s for the card I am using.

Please help advice.

Thank you

Cheers,
Benny ^_^

I'm answering your question as to how I interpret it so it might not be valid..

Just based off what I know, it might not be the speed of the information being written onto the memory card itself.

Instead, it might be the camera's processing speed? Like when how you take 5 consecutive shots in a row, there will be a lag time before the images show up on the screen because it has to process all the information it has acquired.

Hope this helps. :)

Cheers,
Isaac

Ooo... Interesting stuff... thks Isaac...
thus, it may not necessarily mean a faster memory card will have the image written in it any faster than a normal card which all depends on the processing speed of the camera. I guess the speed helps when transferring the information from the card to the card reader and into a digital storage device like a hdd.
:)

Hi Benny,

Are you doing any long exposures? (Anything more than 1 second?)

Well, there's this function for many cameras called the Long Exposure NR - basically if you do a 15 second exposure, a second 15 second blank frame will be taken, and the noise data compiled, compared then removed from the previous picture taken.

Thus, to do a 15 second picture, you'd take 30 secs. :D

Back to your question,

Usually, modern CF cards are fast enough, San Disk Xtreme 2 onwards is good for A100 up to A350, then A700 can visibly benefit from an SanDisk Xtreme 3 card or faster as it has a stream of 5fps, 12mp photos, then A900 would benefit from an even faster card because it has twice the data to move. :)

Regards,
Richard

Thanks Richard for the insightful information~*

Guess the only long exposure would be the night shots which when i select on Aperture piority, most of the time, the shutter speed would be more than 15seconds and thus the long wait...

Though I wont be purchasing any CF cards at the near future, at least I now know that it is not necessary for me to get those that are at the higher end which are costlier since I'm just shooting 10mp images which does not take as long as a A900 to write the biggest image into the card.

Which I would sometimes wonder, will a A900 user be shooting at its maximum scale of 24mp (raw + jpeg) ? it would be twice the file size and i believe storing the photos digitally would really need lots of TB hdds and larger capacity memory cards... :lol:

cheers,
Benny ^_^

That's right Benny,

If you've received the CF cards as a free gift from your camera purchase, it's usually fast enough for the job unless you start to upgrade to a card that has a significantly higher data stream.

My experience with both A700 and A900 basically says, that... well:

If you have an A700 and you use a 8GB card, that card will become a "4GB" card in the A900, as the file sizes are just about twice the size of those from the A700...

So effectively, all the storage you have effectively halves, which is scary, but expected. Although I don't own the A900, I've shot several assignments with it, and I can say that I'm very happy and satisfied with the performance and resolution I get from it. :)

Summarizing a little here, most important is to purchase what you need. You can purchase an ultra high speed card, but if it is not compatible with your system or not necessary for your area of photography, you're better off spending the money elsewhere e.g. 2 lower speed cards instead.

Thanks Shifus~* ^_^

As a RAW picture shooter with continues shooting mode, high speed memory card is my friend ;)