High speed Compact Flash cards

[pminicucci]

Hi Neil:

Phil Askey of DP Review has done an extensive review of the KM A2
here, including some comment on CF write time.

Some else will have to chip in to explain what the engineering is behind determining usable write speeds.

[dnone]

rob galbraith site gives very detailed information indeed, but can somebody explain why the eos 10d and 20d are so diffferent regarding transfer speed?

I was under the impression that both cameras don't support WA (write acceleration)

thx

dan

[Neil C]

Thanks everyone. They Phil Askey review was one of the sources I used to determine which camera to buy, so I am familiar with it. The Rob Galbraith article was extremely useful, even if it did not address the A2 directly.

[Neil C]

I've recently purchased my first digital camera, a KM Dimage A2. I see that CF cards are available at 40x and higher speeds. I could use faster processing for the type of shooting I do, but I'm wondering if faster cards are worth the cost if writing speed is ultimately limited by the camera's ability to write to the card. Can someone explain some of the factors involved in determining the maximum speed CF card that a camera can utilize?

Thanks!

[francois]

Hi,
You may want to have look at Rob Galbraith web site. There's a database of performance of memory cards & DLSR. The A2 is not listed (it's not a DSLR)  but it can give you an idea about the write speed of different cards.

Francois

[francois]

I also understand that WA technology is not used by Canon cameras. The difference between the 10D and 20D comes - probably - from the Digic II chip and different management of the camera's internal memory buffer. The speed of memory card is generally not the limiting factor, at least for the speedy Ultra, Extreme, 80x etc... variety. My comments are for the in camera operations.

Francois

[61Dynamic]

There is a difference between the 10d and 20d in CF card performance because they are two different cameras built at different times. The 20D has more processing power and can write to the card faster.

If I recall correctly, the maximum speed limit for the CF standard is 13MB/s but over even the fastest connections cards never see much more than 9MB/s transfer speeds and no faster than 6MB/s in a camera.

Buying a faster card will benefit you if your camera can take advantage of it. It's doubtfull the A2 will though. But, a faster card would be usefull if you ever do upgrade to a DSLR.

The speed ratings on Lexar cards like "80x" are 80 times 150kb/s which translates to a max speed of 12MB/s, just about the max rate possable for CF cards. The big question is is what that rate refers to. Read or write speed. Something that can make quite a difference in real-world performance..

Lexar's WA tech is hogwash IMHO. There might be some merit to it, but cameras vary in performacnce so much it's impossable to say how much benefit there is to it or if it's just marketing bunk.