I recently bought a canon 7D,
and it seems that my 8Gb card (Sandisk extreme lll 60Mbs) became a little crappy,
especially when shooting 8fps in raw,
Now the quetion is tripple,
should I go for,
reputation, capacity or speed ?
Reputaion ? f.e. Sandisk cards are twice as expensive as Transcend-cards
capacity ? will 16Gb be enough when shooting some series at 8fps
speed ? does 90Mbs make a difference compaired with 60Mbs
crucial question of course what do I shoot ,
well, most stressing I think for the card are :
some events, like sport and dance shows (over 1000 shots with my canon 400d)
and nature, Birds in fly, butterfly's
and finaly of course the budget,
as prices drops with time,
I would not like to spend much more than about a 100€...
already having,
two 2Gb-cards witch I reserve for my old 400d, and the 8Gb-card
kr,
couplos
Direct to you question - I choose mine in this order
1. Price
2. Speed
3. Capasity
4. Name
But I would sugest you to look other way whay arround.
- identify the problem that you have
- what is the reason for this problem.
- accoring to the answer on previous question take an action - buy new card or learn new photographics skills etc. etc.
I don't have such boad experiance - I BIF from time to time and I should say that I newer shoot more than 3 frame in sequence. That is that techniqie that is have learn from experinced bird photographer.
Sport and Dance event are still in my "to learn" list.
Some of my BIF shoots are posted here -
http://86.83.201.134/Photowork/album/Wil...index.html
I could answer the question directly if the Sandisk Extreme Pro 90MB/s cards help at all if Amazon UK delivered mine on time today, but that's a rant for another day.
I can definitely feel a big difference in buffer clearing speed between my Extreme III (30MB/s) and the Extreme (60MB/s) cards. I don't know what the upper speed limit the 7D supports though, if the Extreme Pro (90MB/s) is going to be any more noticeable. Putting that aside, if you *really* need to shoot long bursts, flip to jpeg mode and you can keep going until the shutter dies. Of course in that case you can't expect RAW to rescue badly exposed shots so you need to get that right.
Capacity wise, 16GB gets me somewhere over 500 shots or so.
Personally I dislike changing cards in the field, and you know when the card is almost full, something exciting will happen just when you need to change it. So I'd lean towards too big over too small. Then I tend to choose capacity-speed-cost. I had ordered a 32GB Extreme Pro because, at the time, it was only slightly more than the 16GB and going for a slower card didn't save me any money.
As for other brands, personally I hear too many horror stories about the cheap brands or unbranded ones. I'd stick to Sandisk or Lexar myself.
I now use 1 x 32 GB SanDisk Extreme (not the Pro) and 2 x 32 GB Transcend 400x with 7D. Best balance (for me) between price and performance for the latter at the time I purchased them.
16 GB? Calculate each RAW with about 30 MByte and you run into trouble on dance shows. In video: About 50 Minutes (4 x 12-13 min)in highest resolution.
600x makes a difference shooting sequences at 8 fps for more than 17 frames in RAW. About 17 frames fit into the camera buffer, after that there is some kind of "2-shots, short pause, 2-shots" sequence in process, no matter how fast your card is. The faster the card the shorter the pause and the shorter the "buffer empty lag" to wait before the next 17-shot-sequence in full speed will be ready.
The faster the card is the shorter *may* be the time to read images into the computer. If you're using the USB-2.0-transfer directly from the camera you will have about 16 MByte/s. A good USB 2.0 card reader will do about 33 MByte/s when reading. A really fast card reader (USB 3.0, ExpressCard) will give you whatever the card is able to deliver. I tested my USB 3.0 card reader with an big ISO file and was able to read with more than 65 MByte/s. Surprise: The Transcends are a very little bit faster than my SanDisk in this scenario.
If you are interested in what the fastest card are able to do, visit Rob Galbraith:
http://robgalbraith.com/bins/content_pag...0043-10255
http://robgalbraith.com/bins/content_pag...0044-10297
http://robgalbraith.com/bins/content_pag...1673-12268
And get a second or even third battery for your 7D. This camera is a serious power drain. You will miss the 400D's economic use of battery power, I promise.
Ciao, Walter
Note you don't have to fill the buffer in a single burst. Many shorter bursts with short pauses between them will also fill it up after a while.
As for 7D battery life, if I don't use flash then one battery easily lasts me a day. To me that's at least 5 hours with the camera on, 1000+ shots, with lots of IS activation and focus tracking. And my batteries are getting older now, showing 2 out of 3 blocks on health. I think having a 2nd battery is good practice, but more than that isn't necessary unless you're away from power for several days.
thx for the replies,
I finaly went for a transcend 16Gb/90Mbs,
and in addition a usb 3.0 cardreader
first impression,
17 frames in raw, a gain of 2 frames witch is not really relevant,
in jpeg the card is almost able to keep up, even if the frame rate seems to drop at about 4/5 frames/sec after a while,
concerning the battery, I only can confirm what popo says,
far more than 1000 shots with one battery,
with my 400d with batterygrip and two battery's,
1000 shots was about the limit...
kr,
couplos