Benefits of a fast CF card

[Who Dah?]

Hi all,

I was talking to kigs! who recently bought my Canon 300D and the topic of Compact Flash (CF) cards came up. I'm no expert, but thought I'd share with you all the benefits of a fast CF card that might otherwise be overlooked.

The only real downside is the extra few bucks in the beginning. But these cards are so inexpensive these days that the highest end equipment is only the cost of a frag or two and really isn't THAT much more than the cheapo equipment.

I'm a SanDisk fan myself. The other big-name player is Lexmark. They both have 'proprietary' mechanisms for reading their own cards in their own readers a bit faster. I'm not touting one over the other, they're both great. But this discussion will focus on SanDisk as it is what I'm most familiar with.

The exact card I recommend at the time of this writing is the SanDisk Extreme IV (I'll call it EIV from here on out) card. The 300D is limited to an 8GB card, and that's what I bought. The largest EIV card is 16GB. You should check your camera's specs to see if it can handle a 16GB before rushing out to buy a 16GB card of any brand. Now the 300D is an older camera and cannot even come close to handling the speed that the EIV card can offer. But -- the EIV certainly is not going to slow down the Canon 300D like an older card could. (My old MicroDisk for example.)

However, in today's market, the EIV is on par with or out paces the camera's capabilities by a lesser margin. My current camera is a 40D. I believe the EIV still out paces the 40D. But -- the 40D is indeed fast and an extensive variety of lower speed cards would slow the 40D down. If using a slower card, the camera is taking longer to write to that slower CF card. Why is this bad?

1. If you are bursting shots, you could potentially out run the camera's buffer and card and have to wait for the card to catch up to the camera before taking additional shots. Granted, this is specialty photography that most of us don't do anyways.
2. By slowing down the camera and making the camera talk to the card longer, you are using more battery life. Or said another way, a faster card will save you battery life.

So from the camera's perspective, those are the advantages in a nutshell.

Now -- on the post-production computer side... If you get yourself a fast CF reader, it will make a HUGE difference. If you get yourself a $30 reader instead of a $5 reader, you can potentially turn a 12 minute transfer of 1GB of pictures from a CF card to your computer into less than 1 minute!

Or, you can use my favorite picture browsing software (which is freeware) irfanview. (www.irfanview.com) With a high speed reader and card, I'm able to browse the pictures right off my CF card with minimal delay. My former camera (Canon 300D) was a 6 megapixel camera. There was no noticeable difference when browsing the pictures directly off the CF card then on my hard drive. The 40D is a 10 megapixel camera. There's a bit of difference between browsing off the CF card directly vs. the hard drive. But it's not bad at all and very acceptable.

I will typically shoot a coral 5 times and pick the best of the 5. This allows me to browse 60 shots on the card itself and delete 48 or so of them right off the card. My card is then left with the 12 keeper shots. Then, sometimes I'll transfer those 12 to my hard drive, but usually will just drag/drop them into photoshop right off the card since the speed allows me to do so.

Here are links to the two pieces of equipment I literally use:
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1189)-SanDisk_Extreme_IV_CompactFlash.aspx

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(2012)-SDDRX3-CF-A31-SanDisk_Extreme_20_USB_Readers.aspx

They're available all over the net or eBay.

Hope this helps someone!


-Who Dah?

 

[revhtree]

This is great information! This is something I hadn't thought of and have actually had struggles with. My card being to slow!

Thanks again!

 

[Ibn]

If you want a faster reader, take a look at the Sandisk firewire reader (that's if your computer has a firewire connection). The transfer speed b/w USB 2.0 and firewire is significant.

Also, here's a useful database for CF/SD cards. It's dated, but still useful. I'm using 40D as the camera here since it was brought up above.

http://robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_multi_page.asp?cid=6007-9257

 

[JuniorMC8704]

Good info, and yes a faster card is always the way to go.

As I shoot almost always in RAW mode, the files are HUUUUGE. I have 4 cards on me at all times, and usually go through atleast 3 of them. So not taking 15 minutes per card to rip them onto my mac is a real plus.

 

[Who Dah?]

Ibn: I've been debating about giving that firewire one a try. Have you noticed a significant difference yourself? Thanks for the info!

 

[Poseidon]

True story....

I overheard a salesman at Circuit City trying to sell a DSLR to a couple, he was talking about low light photography, and he actually said, "a high speed memory card will help you take pictures in the dark." When I challenged him to explain HOW, he said that it was high speed, and that high speed memory would allow for faster shutter speeds. I cracked up laughing, and he actually tried to argue with me when I explained shutter speed, ISO, and aperture to the couple.

Maybe I was RUDE by correcting the salesman, but GEESH!!!! How could I let that kind of ignorance go uncorrected?