A Memory Card Torture Test

An anonymous reader writes "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards? If you want to find out how much better a high speed memory card is, check out this group test of high capacity compact flash and SD cards."

Comments

Interesting.

[JPamplin]

You'd think cards developed to the same spec would have equal performance. Is that really not the case with SD or others? Interesting article.

Re:Interesting.

[Shanep]

You'd think cards developed to the same spec would have equal performance. Is that really not the case with SD or others? Interesting article.

I don't know about SD cards, but CF cards are compatible as IDE devices, which itself has various specs with varying performance. Various PIO and DMA modes, etc. This would be like comparing hard drives and then saying, "You'd think drives developed to the same spec would have equal performance".

Some cards are built using high density, low speed, low durability CF, while others go for lower density, high speed, high durability CF and multiples of them in one card. Some newer fast cards employ DMA modes over PIO. Also don't forget, the spec itself is not always the bottleneck, so individual models can vary in performance up to the limit of the particular spec used.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the spec that says a car has four wheels and steering wheel, yet the performance of a Ferrari is markedly different than that of a Geo?

Most of the specs define physical and electrical characteristics, the speed and performance is somewhat abstracted, the device will tell you when it's done, or when it want more data, and can do so in it's own sweet time.

You pay for performance. The higher performing silicon is available in smaller quantities, and commands a premium. Either because the die operates at the higher end of the bell curve and is bined as faster, or is tested more throughly and vigorously.

Re:Interesting.

[Shanep]

Most of the specs define physical and electrical characteristics, the speed and performance is somewhat abstracted, the device will tell you when it's done, or when it want more data, and can do so in it's own sweet time.

Interface specs usually do define signal rates and word size (for parrallel). So specs usually do define a top speed. Certainly in the case of CF.

(Of course serial interfaces also define word sizes and sometimes allow for various sizes, however that typically does not change the bits/second rate by much, if at all, depending on the spec.)

Re:Interesting.

[Andy Dodd]

Some specs allow for variation in performance. For example, if the raw performance of the memory cells is expected to increase significantly, the spec will be designed to allow for the highest speed expected to ever be achieved (or the highest speed economically feasible), but to allow devices to negotiate a slower speed by doing things such as inserting delays. i.e. the spec defines compatibility and not performance, AS LONG as performance can be negotiated to be the lowest common denominator of two devices.

I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.

Re:Interesting.

[mspohr]

It really looks like they ended up testing the speed of the readers/writers rather than the cards themselves.

If you look at the speed ratings, they're all over the map. One SD card, SanDisk Ultra II had the slowest writing speed in one of the readers/writers and the fastest in the Canon camera.

Re:Interesting.

[Angostura]

Precisely. I was vaguely interested in the article - will a more expensive card improve the shooting speed on my camera? I wondered, or more precisely - would it reduce the delay between being able to take pictures?

Page 2 of the article: "many of our digital cameras have limited write speeds too, so the full potential of these so-called high-speed cards will be restricted.".

So nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Interesting.

[dgatwood]

I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.

Most early USB 2.0 (not USB 1.1) readers just plain don't work. Even using the words "high speed" with those readers makes me laugh. They fail at USB/1.1 speeds.

The most common early USB 2.0 flash reader chipset (commonly used in 5-way and 6-way readers or thereabouts) had critical timing-sensitive bugs that were fixed in later revs that cause massive data corruption for transfer sizes over about 512 bytes at a time. At periods proportional to the transfer size (I think), one block is substituted with a copy of block zero, usually right in the middle of your files. This only occurs on OSes that actually try to transfer data in large chunks ant buffer it like Mac OS X and Linux, resulting in bizarre banding on photos, and since the data is cached, there's no way to re-read the data with that reader and get back the right data. You simply have to pull the card and stick it in a different reader.

On Windows, the same readers usually "just work" because Windows does I/O in smaller chunks and AFAIK never buffers anything from removable devices. The problem you describe may very well be the same bug, just appearing at smaller transfer sizes due to the data becoming available more quickly or something.

I once did a hacked driver that capped transfers at 512 bytes to work around the problem. Disgusting, and performance sucks, but it should theoretically make some really seriously broken USB card readers "work".... I don't have the reader anymore, so I don't really care.... I figured out that workaround after realizing that even with the broken reader, I could use 'dd' to clone the card one block at a time, resulting in a valid .iso image with no corruption....

Anyway, after that experience, it's FireWire readers or bust....

Re:Interesting.

[pilgrim23]

Interesting article

in print adverts, you associate the bright colors of the ad with the pleasure of the article. In online articles, where the page is bracketed into less then 200 words, then spread over 24 pages all resplendent with ads,one picture, and a host of shockwave crud flashing at you while the article, instead of smoothly flipping from page to page...slooooooowly loads that revolting ad on page 12... Your anger subtly builds as you watch Acme brand blink blink blink. You forget about it till... The next day at the store: "humm Acme... Brand X... where WAS it I heard something bad about Acme? I KNOW there was SOMETHING I dislike about them.." I'll buy brand X. -I am not sure this is the goal but advertisement DOES work. Web guys, please take this effect into account..

Re:Interesting.

[diskis]

Depends. If you take your pics in single JPEGs it hardly matters.

On my Panasonic FZ-10, I can take a burst of 4 pictures in about 2 seconds. On an cheap slow card, the camera writes almost 10 seconds before letting me take more pictures. With a 133x card, the recycle time is only about 2-3 seconds.

Same cards again in my friends FZ-30, taking pictures in RAW format. At about 15 megs each, it took almost 10 seconds to write a single picture, but on the 133x card perhaps two.
So that camera can write at least 15 megs/ 2 seconds, I don't know what would happen with faster cards, but cards writing slower that 7.5 megs/sec would slow the camera down.

Re:Interesting.

[modecx]

Exactly.

Externally, newer high speed CF cards support PIO mode 3 which supports around 11MB/s (iirc). Since the external interface is much faster than the numbers they publish (the highet read speed being 8.1MB/s) we have to conclude that the limitation is on the other side of the memory controller. The limiting factor in the future will be what modes your camera and reader support, assuming you intend to use these huge flash drives in a camera. My 20D wants one. I heard it say so.

Re:Interesting.

[madcow_ucsb]

Exactly. And people would be wise to remember that. Take the whole USB vs 1394 arguments that come up from time to time. Some people insist that since high speed USB 2.0 runs at 480Mbps versus Firewire's 400Mbps, USB is *obviously* faster. Nevermind the fact that 480/400 are signalling rates that have absolutely nothing to do with throughput. Speaking as a USB developer, the spec just says that when a host or device sends a 512 byte USB packet, it goes down the wire at a speedy 480Mbps.

But the spec doesn't care how often you send one of those speedy packets. So in reality, going thru the whole MS disk and USB stacks, you're looking at *maybe* 200Mbps of actual throughput.

Hell, the fastest USB device I ever saw was a piece of hardware that did nothing but consume data as fast as its little memory bus could run with a driver that sent the biggest payloads as fast as it could and it crapped out at 320Mbps (limited by the PC).

Remember: higher signalling rates don't always lead to higher throughput!

Re:Interesting.

[jridley]

You pay for performance
These days, more and more only really with name brands. Take a look at Newegg or any of the discount sellers, I've been buying SD lately. If you buy the generics, it's ALL 133 or 150x. Only the name brands are still selling the old slow crap. If you buy the cheapest stuff out there, it's generic, and it's fast. Then if you spend a bit more money, you get into the slow-ass name brand stuff, and if you pay top dollar, you get back to fast again.

Re:Interesting.

[Andy Dodd]

I wasn't even thinking of USB readers - I've seen reports that the Palm Treo 600 (and possibly the 650, I can't be sure) had issues with extremely high speed cards such as the SanDisk Extreme III series because they were too fast.

Rob Galbraith DPI has huge DB of performance

[OS24Ever]

The Rob Galbraith DPI website has a huge database of performance with various cards and various cameras. I use this as a benchmark for deciding when I need a new CF card vs. the Camera I have, and the family of camera I'd love to upgrade too one day.

Re:Rob Galbraith DPI has huge DB of performance

[God'sDuck]

Rob's database is also crucial because different cards excel with different manufacturers -- the differing write acceleration specs aren't implemented uniformly.

Re:Rob Galbraith DPI has huge DB of performance

[pijokela]

That is really great info. Unfortunately the site only has data for professional (== expensive) cameras. Any idea if someone has something similar for consumer models?

I'd be really interested even for a general "For this camera it is useful to buy a good memory card." result for my Nikon Coolpics 8700. The damn RAW images save forever...

Re:Rob Galbraith DPI has huge DB of performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to now, at least, consumer cameras have low enough throughput that the card speed has not been the limiting factor. When consumers post questions about high-speed cards on a photo forum, the answer has inevitably been "Your camera won't be fast enough for a fast card. Buy on price."

Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari?

What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?

(These are serious questions ...)

Rich.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari?" No, most high end cars require preimium gas.

"What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff?" Premium gas has a higher octane number which prevents pre-detonation, aka "knock", which allows high performance engines to operate at higher compression ratios.

" Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?" No, most every gas station I have been to in my life sells "regular", "silver", and "premium" gas. Have you never bought gas before?

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Riddlefox]

I think they meant, would you put regular (85 or 87 octane) gas into your Ferrari, instead of ponying up the extra 20 cents a gallon for premium (91 or 93 octane).

Higher octane gas resists burning better. In a high compression engine (or a turbo/supercharged engine), the extra pressure can make gas detonate instead of burn. That detonation is bad for the engine. Lower performance engines don't put as much stress on the gasoline, so they can burn lower-octane gasoline. Putting high-octane gas in your low-performance engine doesn't do anything except lighten your wallet.

Read here for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Melkman]

Road going Ferraris indeed use regular fuel. A racing Ferrari, like the F1 cars, is an other thing. They use fuel which is tuned for the specific race they have to run. See http://www.formula1.com/insight/technicalinfo/11/6 46.html for some more detail. The whole analogy between fuel and memory cards doesn't make sense. Fuel is consumed but cards are used over and over again.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Denyer]

most every gas station I have been to in my life sells "regular", "silver", and "premium" gas. Have you never bought gas before? Probably not in America. Everything at a filling pump is assumed to be of a certain quality over here in the UK.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[east coast]

Probably not in America. Everything at a filling pump is assumed to be of a certain quality over here in the UK.

Do you know what the octane rating is for gasoline?

Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates R'chmd wgah'nagl fhtagn.

My goodness. Someday you'll see the light... or the darkness as that may be.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[dario_moreno]

well, don't you know that one is supposed to always use bad car analogies in anything related to computers ? More to the point, if you, like many of us can only afford, have a Ferrari that is more than 15 years old (say a Mondial) , it is better to use cheap oil (with characteristics appropriate to the car) than modern, expensive, synthetic oil, which is too fluid.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[MyLongNickName]

It's called octane. Has nothing to do with quality.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?

If I spend X hundred grand on a car today, & it doesn't come with a GPS system running on private satelites that automaticly determines the best approved station for me to stop at along my route & adjust my route to get there, I'll fucking strangle someone. :)

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[squiggleslash]

High octane fuels reduce knock but at the expense of creating carbon build-up, which in turn causes knock.

The rule of thumb when chosing gas is to use the lowest octane fuel available that, when used, allows your engine to operate without knock except occasionally during accelleration and going up-hill. Too high an octane is damaging for your engine in the long run.

The problem is that most people don't seem to know that, and think "High octane" means "High quality". It doesn't. They're all of equal quality, at most gas stations, it's just some older cars require higher octane gas because their engines are have too much carbon build-up, and as such the gas is being compressed to a higher pressure before deliberate ignition.

If Ferraris really "need" higher octane fuel, then that's a deliberate design decision, akin to chosing between diesel and gasoline (which, actually, in some ways is an extreme version of the whole octane thing), not something that's a result of higher octane fuel being better quality.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Smauler]

Probably not in America. Everything at a filling pump is assumed to be of a certain quality over here in the UK.

Erm.... Just about all petrol companies offer different octanes. Standard unleaded in the UK is 95 octane, which is a lot higher than the US I think. BP offer "ultimate", which is 97, Shell offer a 98, and Tesco offer a 99. Most others offer higher than standard octane too - where do you buy petrol?

OT - As an aside to those in the US, it's horribly expensive, £1 per litre, which is about $7 a US gallon if my maths is correct. To fill up my car costs well over the equivalent of $100.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[ptbarnett]

I'm not going to bother with the rest of your BS, and I hope no one takes it seriously. But, this is a good example of the validity of your posting:

Last time I checked, jet airplane gas was $.30 per gallon at the airports.

You are off by about an order of magnitude. Prices vary according to location, but even the lowest prices are comparable to regular unleaded. For a list of "great deals", see:

http://airnav.com/fuel/greatdeals/

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

While meeting some minimum standard, is not the same as something that exceeds the standard.

Even in the UK you used to have 2 Star and 4 Star petrol, though I suspect that what you have as Unleaded is more potent and cleaner than the crap we have in the US. Though you are probably paying about $8 a gallon compared to $3.

So you'd want to use 92/93 Octane in the Ferrari, and not the 86/87 Octane stuff. Then again you might want to buy the 100 Octane racing fuel.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[kfg]

Metal does not break, unless you hit it really hard, or heat it up a ton.

Which is, as it happens, exactly what happens to your pistons and valves.

Even running an engine with no oil in it to lubricate the moving parts and reduce friction will not break metal, it will simply reduce the power and efficiency of the engine. The same goes for the transmission. Metal does not wear out or break, at least not in our lifetimes.

Oh, hey, that's a good one.

Jet fuel works pretty good, if you have an engine that can withstand the extra heat and force.

Oh, hey, that's a really good one.

I assume that turbine engines aren't popular for the same reason . . . the turbine is much more suited to the speed up and slow down style of the roads. . .

Nearly as good as the jet fuel thingy.

KFG

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

Putting high-octane gas in your low-performance engine doesn't do anything except lighten your wallet.

It's either give it to the gas stations a little at a time, or the mechanic that works on your car in one big chunk.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[chmod a x mojo]

I call BS.

metal doesn't break unless you hit it hard? damn, why didn;t anyone tell that to my prybar? for your information, metal CAN break very easy. example aluminum work hardens, any flexing of the metal causes it to crystalize and it actually gets so hard that it can not bend anymore and it just cracks. steel is almost the same, except it takes heat/carbon content to crystalize the metal, and what is gas... hot burning hydro-CARBONS. feel free to argue with me, i work with steels aluminum and engines for a living. and also running an engine without oil WILL break it, try it and take it apart down to the piston sleeves you will see a lot of scoring and many times even cuts right through the sleeve to the cast block of your engine. not to mention the heat from the friction ( wich the oil helps cool) will warp your engine block causeing your block to warp and gaskets to not fit right anymore.
you did not notice any difference in your bike because it is a low compression engine, try running a low octane fuel through a turbocharged engine once, the fuel will actually explode on the compression stroke before the piston is fully extended on the crank. using a higher octane fuel increases the ignition point of the fuel so that the heat generated by the compression of the air-fuel mix will not ignite it. on your bike i think the compression ratio is probably about 9:1 / 10:1 on a super/turbo charged engine the compression can actually reach as high as 20:1 or higher.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[tomstdenis]

Of course you fail to mention that your country is also

a) lot smaller

b) Not trading in USD :-)

c) Full of weird as small cars [not a bad thing though].

I mean for me to drive home to my folks place is equivalent to [roughly] driving entirely from one end of England to the other. And I don't even leave the province I'm in to do my trip!!! Talk to me when you live in a country that is 3000Km wide about the price of gas.

That and yeah, if oil wasn't traded in USD you'd probably have an easier time buying gas. Of course the next logical choice is the euro, not the pound. So you're still fucked.

Tom

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, high octane gasoline causes more wear-and-tear on your engine than low octane. Higher octane gasoline increases the rate of carbon buildup among other things. So really, it's more like giving to the station a little at a time, and to the mechanic in one big chunk.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Shanep]

Even running an engine with no oil in it to lubricate the moving parts and reduce friction will not break metal, it will simply reduce the power and efficiency of the engine.

Run a typical combustion engine with NO lubrication and you will get increased friction and thus increased heat and thus eventually a seized engine which might even include pistons which have welded themselves into the cylinder.

Metal does not wear out or break, at least not in our lifetimes.

What the hell are you talking about? I've worked in gear systems with Navy equipment and printers and it was quite common to see metal to metal gears wearing each other out. I often saw metal-plastic-metal gears because it actually increased the life of low-torque gear-boxes and even then only the plastic gears needed replacing. This was done because metal does wear out against metal.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[wonkobeeblebrox]

> "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it?

Actually, I put regular gas in my Ferrari. Works just great.
Everyone once in a while that weird "Check Engine" light goes on. I just ignore it.

Oh wait, I meant that I put regular gas in my Toyota Echo. That works great. Gets 44 mpg winter/39mpg summer (Phoenix resident). I live 7 miles from work. I fill up once a month. I love it.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

Actually, the European and American methods of measuring octane are a little different. The end result is about the same for what you put in the engine.

Europe uses RON, the US uses CLC (RON+MON)/2.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[allusionist]

Where I live in the US, regular gas (I think it's 87? 88?) is $2.89/ gallon on a good day, up to about $3.05. My car's pretty gas efficient, and I get 300 miles on about $35. My mother's car costs closer to $60 for the same distance.

On the other hand, I'm making about $200/month after taxes. A CD costs me $10-$18, and I can get a good sandwich for $5. All considered, it's not too bad a difference.

Hooray global economy!

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[level_headed_midwest]

Gas of that octane here is getting up there in price, but your taxes are a *lot* higher. Regular in the U.S. is always 87 octane, mid-grade is usually 89 octane, sometimes 88 or 90 at some oddball stations, and premium is 91 or 93 octane. Right now in Columbia, Missouri (town of ~90,000 in central Missouri, home to the University of Missouri) 87 octane is $2.79/gallon, mid-grade is $2.79-$2.92/gallon (the 10% ethanol mid-grade is the same price as regular unleaded as there is a lot of ethanol produced here, and the no-alcohol mid-grade is ~$0.10/gal more than regular) and premium is $2.99-$3.02/gallon. Taxes are 38.7 cents/gallon total on gasoline and 41.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel, which is about $2.90/gallon right now. I have seen 100 octane "racing fuel" sold at some specialty stations and that stuff is about $4-5/gallon.

I am curious as to why the octane is so high on that fuel in Britain. The engines that you use are more or less the same ones we use here and most run fine on 87 octane. (Case in point: The Ford Focus is a popular car here and also supposed to be popular in Europe too, and both run with an identical 2.3L four that runs happily on 87 octane here, according to Ford.) The extra octane should allow your engines to run a much higher compression ratio and/or be supercharged or turbocharged without suffering detonation problems.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[caseih]

Many high-end engines require the highest octane gas, so you'd likely have to pay for the more expensive gas anway.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

Once More:
High Octane Gasoline high quality gasoline.

It has been adjusted, usually through adding chemicals, to burn a little slower. Too low of an octane for the engine's compression leads to knocking. Messing with the timing can fix some of this, but not all. Basically, if your car doesn't specify high octane, and it isn't pinging/knocking, you're better off with the cheap stuff. It's what your engine was designed for.

Now, a higher compression engine is more efficient and has more power for the displacement. Thus, it's popular for high end sports cars, planes, and such.

I ended up doing a bunch of research on this because I looked into converting my car to ethanol (with California switching from MTBE, my plans have been delayed. The cost of ethanol has skyrocketed from the increased demand). With a RON of 106 vs. 95 for gasoline, I'd be able to make up the difference in energy density(ethanol has only 2/3 the energy of gasoline) by increasing the compression in my engine by switching out the pistons.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

Not to mention that the worst you generally have to worry about with a cheap card is it failing early or being slow.

Putting regular into a high compression engine can damage it.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the most nonsense posts I have ever seen on Slashdot. Reading it was like reading an article "proving" that the USA never landed on the moon.

Metal doesn't wear out or break? Un-lubricated engines are simply less efficient? Turbines are more efficient than piston engines? (not at partial-loads they're not). Engines are indestructable?

I hope you were trying to be funny.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Deadstick]

If all your gas is of the same octane rating, and Ferraris work in the UK, you're being screwed.

rj

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[archen]

Just to expand a bit...

Actually relating to the ferrari question, if Ferrari tells you to put regular gas and a cup of water into the gast tank, you put regular gas and a cup of water in the gas tank! THEY designed the engine. Back in the 50's engines were so inefficent that it didn't make much of a difference, but with all the sensors, and gizmos on modern engines to get a better burn you need to put the correct octane in your car.

Some engines produce less power if you put a higher octane than the car is rated for because certain calibrations make assumptions about how the gas will burn. Best rule of thumb is to read directions and put whatever the car owners manual tells you to =)

So anyway the correct answer is to do whatever Ferrari tells you to.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

I ended up doing a bunch of research on this because I looked into converting my car to ethanol (with California switching from MTBE, my plans have been delayed. The cost of ethanol has skyrocketed from the increased demand). With a RON of 106 vs. 95 for gasoline, I'd be able to make up the difference in energy density(ethanol has only 2/3 the energy of gasoline) by increasing the compression in my engine by switching out the pistons.

So what, you get taller pistons, or ones with a different surface shape that makes the space in there smaller ?

There may specifics to all this stuff, but I've blown up enough cars to know life is much easier if you remember it as "It's either give it to the gas stations a little at a time, or the mechanic that works on your car in one big chunk".

Might not work for everyone, but it works for me.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[subStance]

Phtttt ... and you call yourself Rich ...

real rich people know the answers to this stuff.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[austad]

Some engines require higher octane fuel to prevent detonation though. If I put 87 octane in my car and start up my datalogger, I see knock and it kicks the timing back a few degrees to prevent it. The car runs at reduced efficiency. If the timing wasn't backed off it would detonate the fuel, which means it explodes instead of burns. This generates increased temps which can burn holes in the pistons. If it cannot back off the timing anymore, like on a hot dry day, it will start backing off the boost (turbo pressure) from 23psi to something around 14psi.

Putting high octane fuel in your chevy cavalier is a waste of money, but putting it in certain types of cars is a requirement to prevent engine damage.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Tim Browse]

See, that's why in the UK we tend to smile at jokes about us having lots of weird small cars. :-)

Where I live in the US, regular gas (I think it's 87? 88?) is $2.89/ gallon on a good day, up to about $3.05. My car's pretty gas efficient, and I get 300 miles on about $35.

My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor that did 35+ mpg, ffs.

My mother's car costs closer to $60 for the same distance.

14 mpg?! Holy crap. What is it, a Chieftain tank?!

Never mind game console standby power usage, get your car manufacturers to sort out their fuel efficiency. If you had to pay UK prices at the pump, I'm guessing that might accelerate the process :-)

Of course, in the UK, the cost of petrol is largely taxation. It's something like 75% of the price, which usually gets people going.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Smauler]

I am curious as to why the octane is so high on that fuel in Britain. The engines that you use are more or less the same ones we use here and most run fine on 87 octane.

I just wandered about a bit & found the answer. There are two types of octane measurement, RON (Research Octane number) and MON (Motor Octane number). Most of the world uses RON, whereas the US and Canada use a mean of RON and MON. MON is 8-10 points lower than RON, depending on the fuel, thus the US octane number is the equivalent of 4-5 point lower for the same fuel. Therefore an octane rating of 95 in most of the world is equivalent to 90 or 91 in the US. I guess that does mean there is still a 3 or 4 point difference between your 87 and our 95, but it's not as large as I thought. Lots of European cars have a 95 octane recomended figure, minimum 91, which is about equivalent to your 87. Wikipedia is my friend : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[damiam]

I am curious as to why the octane is so high on that fuel in Britain.

It's not. The UK uses a different measurement for octane, which yields higher numbers. The gas itself is about the same.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[gerardrj]

There are different methods for rating octane. RON, MON and (RON+MON)/2 are the major ones. I think the UK uses RON and I know the US uses (RON+MON)/2. RON is always a larger number than MON for the same fuel.

Another US vs World rating issue is stereo amplifier power. In the US we rate in RMS (Root Mean Squared) or more simply, average power output. In much of the rest of the world they rate in peak power. In PP a stereo might be rated as 200W but in the US that same stereo could perhaps only be rated as 60W. Both numbers are correct, the stereo CAN produce 200W of output for very brief moments, but it can sustain 60W of output indefinitely. Which is more accurate? Up to you to decide.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[mph]

Standard unleaded in the UK is 95 octane, which is a lot higher than the US I think.

Higher, but not by as much as it sounds. Different measurement methods (RON vs. R+M/2) are used in the two countries, so you can't compare the numbers directly.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

So what, you get taller pistons, or ones with a different surface shape that makes the space in there smaller ?

They'd be slightly domed, rather than flat. It doesn't take much. Taller pistons might require a different head (depends on the spacing). Another option is to shave the head, but that's more difficult to reverse if you have to. 30x->x becomes 30x-y -> x-y, increasing the difference between piston in the low postion vs the high position. (x=volume of chamber under full compression, y=volume difference between flat&domed piston).

The tradeoff would be that if I couldn't get ethanol, I'd have to burn premium.

There may specifics to all this stuff, but I've blown up enough cars to know life is much easier if you remember it as "It's either give it to the gas stations a little at a time, or the mechanic that works on your car in one big chunk".

Changing your oil regularly and doing the preventive mainenance in the service book does more to prevent the big trip to the mechanic than using 'premium' gasoline. As others have stated, high-octance gasolines can actually cause more carbon deposit buildup, resulting in a trip to the mechanic.

The rule of thumb is 'Use the lowest octane gasoline that doesn't knock'. IE what's in your service manual. If that knocks, take to to see the mechanic for a tune-up/checkup/repair.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

High octane fuels reduce knock but at the expense of creating carbon build-up, which in turn causes knock.

Bullshit, not if your engine is designed so that it needs high octane. High compression, and/or abusive conditions (high RPM and heat) require a higher octane. You will not get carbon buildup if you're running the engine within its design parameters. You might get extra carbon buildup if you spend all your time in stop-and-go traffic with a low compression engine and high octane fuel but that's a different beast. You would be running a low burning fuel under low temperatures and it won't burn completely.

The fact that you don't know anything about Ferrari engines explains a lot. These typically have very high RPM ranges and high compression.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Vegeta99]

If I recall correctly, UK pumps display RON, or Research Octane Number. It is often higher than the MON, or Motor Octane Number. Pumps in the US display the average of the two, sometimes known as the Anti-Knock Index.

In the US, we've got regulations as to a minimum quality for gasoline two, and many places have mandatory forumulation changes in respect to the seasons (more oxygenates for winter, etc.)

"Regular" gas here is 87 AKI. Most places sell 87, 91, and 93 AKI here in PA. I'd assume a Ferrari wants the high-proof.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

The rule of thumb is 'Use the lowest octane gasoline that doesn't knock'. IE what's in your service manual. If that knocks, take to to see the mechanic for a tune-up/checkup/repair

LOL

I'll just stick with the good stuff, somthing about reducing the quality of my gasoline untill my engine starts to knock just doesn't sound right to me.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

Wasn't that what Riddlefox just explained to you?

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

You're pissing money away then.

Per this comment's PDF link (http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1919 05&cid=15762953)

High octane gasoline has been refined more - it is just a better product.
Additional refining steps are used to increase the octane; however, these additional steps do not necessarily make the gasoline a "better" product for all engines. They just yield a different blend of hydrocarbons that burn more slowly. The additional steps also increase the price.

There are times I'll run a tank of 89 through my 99 Grand Marquis just to eliminate some of the wide-open-throttle pinging which seems to develop in warm weather. However, I will not run it constantly like that, because my wallet enjoys holding on to those Washingtons (and Franklins etc.)

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

High octane gasoline has been refined more - it is just a better product.

Is there somthing wrong with that ?
I don't know about everyone else, but I like better products.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

To add to your comments, some manufacturers state RMS on amplifiers without stating the amount of distortion they get out of it...

You could buy a high end amplifier that gives 50W RMS/stereo channel @ .007%thd... whereas you could buy a low-end 100W RMS/stereo channel @ 1%thd, and I would bet the 50W amplifier would sound "louder" or "better" on the same speakers, all other things being the same.

Of course, once you start buying low enough, it seems that Manufacturers can twist the #s to mean whatever they want....

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[jrmcferren]

Gees, no wonder your petrol is so expensive. Your regular has a higher octane than our premium. Over here it is 87 (minimum) for regular, 89 (minimum) for mid-grade, and 92 (minimum) for premium (sometimes a higher premium of 94 is offered. This all said your octane rating system may be diffrent over there too.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

The way I see it, we have 2 major problems in the US "car" infrastructure that requires a somewhat low MPG:

1. Everyone seems to like to "drive it like they stole it." There are some notable exceptions on my daily commute around I270 here in Columbus, OH..... but they tend to get tailgated like mad.
2. Keeping up with the Jonses means you must have the largest SUV in the subdivision. I know a guy who tows a modest boat, and he has an Excursion. Doesn't have kids; would probably even be suited fine with a V6 truck of sorts.

It also seems that peer pressure (goes with #2) keeps a lot of people from driving what would be considered a good milage car. In addition, most of the smaller gas-efficient cars that I've had the pleasure of driving seem to just fall apart on themselves quicker. Maybe it's because of that drive-it-like-I-stole-it attitude.....

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no. *ALL* the world measures in root mean square. Its the only measurement method that means anything.

P-P (Usually called PMPO, for "Power Music Power Output") is used solely by marketing, AFIAK.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Eljas]

If you bother to convert all those numbers, why not include SI so that the rest of the siviliced world can understand too? FYI, the offical SI unit of fuel efficiency is firkin of water per furlong.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[radish]

As a Brit living in the US I can attest to the fact that (a) petrol is a lot cheaper here and (b) lots of people drive absurd cars with terrible fuel consumption. However, one thing which might alleviate your concerns a little is to know that the US Gallon is smaller than the UK Gallon (1.2:1). So those numbers probably aren't directly comparable.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Absolutely beautiful troll. There's just enough clues in there to tip off people who know what they're talking about, yet still enrage people who don't know as much as they think they do. Well done.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked at the formatting this moron has placed his incorehent babbling in and the rating and passed it by...thank you /. mods.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[karnal]

Sorry, forgot to clarify...

bold+italics = myth.
italics = fact.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm making about $200/month after taxes.

For your sake i hope you are missing a zero...!

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

What's the difference between somthing that's been refined less, & somthing that has been refined more that has had a lessor impurity put into it ?

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 50's engines were so inefficent that it didn't make much of a difference, but with all the sensors, and gizmos on modern engines to get a better burn you need to put the correct octane in your car.

Actually, all the 'sensors and gizmos' (heh) in a modern engine makes it LESS sensitive to octane rating. The engine will sense the onset of knock and change ignition timing (and charge pressure, where applicable) to avoid it. The result is reduced HP, but pretty much never damage. Heck, my father once put diesel in a gas car. It stopped, but once they flushed the diesel out, it ran like a clock again. :-)

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

The numbers can't be compared if you don't know what type of driving the guy is doing. My '92 Nissan Maxima (3.0 l engine, 160 hp) gets about 26 mpg on the open road (2000 mile road-trips), about 16 mpg drivng in the city (mostly 3-4 mile trips). The numbers of more recent Maximas should be about the same - improvements in engine design and control have gone into making more horsepower (rather than in economy), and the newer cars are heavier. It's what Americans seem to want...

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[DarkVader]

Haven't we gone over this enough?

High octane gas = better product if you have a high-compression engine.

Low octane gas = better product if you have a low-compression engine.

There is actually more energy per gallon in low octane gas, but in a higher compression engine, it can ignite from the compression, rather than from the spark. This is a problem.

If you put the expensive stuff in a low-compression engine, you will get lower fuel mileage and cause excessive carbon buildup - which will cost you a lot more money, and shorten the life of your engine.

Your car MAY need high octane gas - but DO NOT assume this. It may instead need low octane gas.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

Haven't we gone over this enough?

I must have missed the lecture, perhaps it's time for you to move on if you've discussed it enough times before ?

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

3l with 160hp?

Holy crap!

VW has a 1.7l engine with 170hp!

Talk about waste... No wonder it literaly drinks gas... 3l!!!

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Smauler]

Of course you fail to mention that your country is also

a) lot smaller

I used to do a (relatively) regular drive of Ipswich to Durham and back, which is 300 miles or so. If you take it to extremes, Penzance to Thurso is over 800 miles. The UK is not tiny, it's pretty thin in places, though.

c) Full of weird as small cars [not a bad thing though]

Weird small cars go round corners.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

[CORRECTION]

3l with 160hp?

Holy crap!

VW has a 1.4l engine with 170hp! (and testing an evolution of the same said engine, now in 200hp flavor)

Talk about waste... No wonder it literaly drinks gas... 3l!!!

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Murphy Murph]

How the fuck did the parent get moderated informative?

1-Higher octane fuel will not increase carbon buildup.
2-As a car gets older, it does not need higher octane fuel. The idea that even a severe case of combustion-chamber carbon buildup could cause a measurable increase in compression ratio is silly. As a car ages, its compression ratio tends to decrease due to ring blow-by, and carbon buildup preventing the valves from sealing well.
3-Higher performance cars often need higher octane fuel because they run at a higher compression ratio, run hotter, and therefore have an increased likelihood of pre-ignition.
4-If you car was designed for 87 octane, and it is knocking during acceleration, that is NOT good, and is often a sign of a timing issue you should fix, not mask with higher octane fuel.
Even occasional knocking during heavy load conditions is bad, as it can cause damage to the engine. Fuel pre-ignition not only causes waste heat (leading into the cycle of more pre-ignition), but the shock of pre-ignition on a rising piston can cause a great deal of damage if allowed to continue for very long, which is (one of the reasons) why many modern cars have knock detectors, and retard the timing if it is detected.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Smauler]

Of course, in the UK, the cost of petrol is largely taxation. It's something like 75% of the price, which usually gets people going.

Taxation is actually around 66 pence a litre now IIRC - it's just hitting the 2/3rd mark, 67%. It used to be a higher percentage, but then the price of oil went up.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[zoney_ie]

Not necessarily. If we had the UK and other EU countries in the Eurozone also, then possibly more worldwide commodities (including oil) would be traded in Euro. After all, the EU as a whole accounts for more trade than the US.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[BizidyDizidy]

I can drive 800 miles and not leave Texas.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[blane.bramble]

Most UK fuel consumption quotes are for the combined figure that takes a mix of motorway cruising and town driving. For instance, my old car did about 38mpg driving to work (part A road = 70mph, part crawling through town), but could achieve about 58mpg when doing long distance (All motorway and A road). These are real figures measured by mileage divided by actual fuel consumed, not manufacturers figures.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, over 200% of the cost of gas is in the for of military protection of oil routes.

It costs $6 per gallon of gas to protect the oil routes?

I was going to say something about memory cards but I'd probably get modded off topic.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

. However, one thing which might alleviate your concerns a little is to know that the US Gallon is smaller than the UK Gallon (1.2:1). So those numbers probably aren't directly comparable.

But gas isn't sold by the gallon in the UK... Price comparisons are liter to US gallons.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Tony Hoyle]

They actually quote both. Mine does about 65mpg combined (51/78)- and I've calculated I'm getting even better than even with some urban driving in there. My fuel economy went up a lot when I learned how to drive to improve efficiency (for my car that's keeping an optimal 2000rpm as much as possible - if I shift into 4th too fast it drops below 1000rpm and starts to drink fuel like it was going into fashion.. something they don't tell you in the manuals).

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[tomstdenis]

Toronto to Winnipeg which oddly enough goes through the states [stupid lakes].

According to google that is 2,200Km (1367 miles). That's just the next province. Try this out

Toronto to Vancouver. A mere 4,379km (2720 miles).

Tom

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[cellocgw]

I can drive 800 miles and not leave Texas.
Try straightening out the steering wheel now and then :-)

I can drive 800 miles and not leave my cul-de-sac, too....

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

"VW has a 1.4l engine with 170hp!"

And half the tourque.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[toadlife]

"These are real figures measured by mileage divided by actual fuel consumed, not manufacturers figures."

I don't know about the UK, but the "manufacturer figures" advertised with new cars in the U.S. are pretty accurate. My car was advertised as getting 22-city/27-highway, and it gets exactly that.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Nevyn]

Note that a US gallon is smaller than a UK gallon, see wikipedia's gallon entry. 25 US ~= 30 UK ... which still isn't great, but we don't care because it's so cheap ;)

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Suddenly_Dead]

Umm, that part of the article wasn't dealing with SI units. It was contrasting SI to the far stranger FFF (Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight). Kilometers per litre would be more typical, I'd think.

Of course, I have no way of knowing if your post was supposed to be humorous, because the internet sucks at conveying any sort of emotion at all.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[fm6]

That's a good, simple, clear, and concise explanation. But it leaves a couple of important questions unanswered. How is a fancy camera like a high-performance car? And how is brand-name memory like high-octane gas? Comparing a digital camera to a Ferrari is bullshit.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[vrt3]

Over here in Europe we use liters per 100 km. My car consumes about 5.6 l/100 km (it's a diesel), which is 42 mpg according to Google's unit convertor.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Bastian]

I mean for me to drive home to my folks place is equivalent to [roughly] driving entirely from one end of England to the other. And I don't even leave the province I'm in to do my trip!!! Talk to me when you live in a country that is 3000Km wide about the price of gas.

You seem to be operating under the belief that burning a lot of gas entitles you to cheaper gas. It doesn't. Gasoline is a commodity, not a right. It'd be wise to come to grips with that fact ASAP, because North American gas prices are going to continue to rise out of their artificially low state, and will probably continue to rise as oil becomes more scarce. If you want to talk to anybody about the price of gas, I'd suggest starting with the mindless machinations of the world economy.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Bing Tsher E]

Pollution and safety regulations in the U.S. also contribute a good deal to the 'SUV' phenomenon. Cars have to meet stringent safety standards, and car makers must meet 'average of entire fleet sold' mileage standards, which force them to produce a certain percentage of economy cars to balance out their gas guzzler 'sports' models. Trucks have lax safety and fuel consumption standards, because of 'exemptions' granted to them by the government.

So what does Detroit do? They heavily promote less-safe, gas-guzzling SUVs.

In a sense, the loophole-ridden emissions and safety standards are to blame for the 'SUV explosion' on the roads.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think again, Skippy!

The 1992 Nissan Maxima 3.0 V6 OHC (160HP) is rated at 247 Nm, the 1.4 TFSi engine is rated at 240 Nm.

I'll gladly trade those 7 Nm (which you can't even notice anyway) for the serious mpg advantage the small 1.4 has over the gargantuan 3.0, thank you very much.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can drive 800 miles and not leave my cul-de-sac, too....

Ya, but your neighbors would probably start to worry about you :)

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Bing Tsher E]

My Harmon-Kardon 'Award 100' series integrated amplifier (all vacuum tube from the late 60's) is so low-noise that you can turn the volume up all the way and you hear almost no 'hiss' or hum. You do hear an ominous small amount of noise as the tone arm on the turntable is lifted by the turntable mechanism, though, and it warns you to TURN IT DOWN because if you don't you'll be thrown across the room when the needle hits vinyl.

That's low noise, not low distortion, but it's also a low distortion amplifier. Not insanely low, of course, there were McIntosh amps for that if you were a millionaire back then.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[puppet10]

No circles East/West

No Circles North/South

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[vought]

High octane fuels reduce knock but at the expense of creating carbon build-up, which in turn causes knock.



This is completely incorrect, as are people who put regular gas in turbo cars or other high compression engines thinking "it's all gas".

To the dumb girl at the gas station: when your cute little 230 Kompressor eats a valve because you thought it was "all just gas"...well, you should paid attention to the little sticker on the gas cap (the one you see every time you gas in your car) that is printed in bold black-on-yellow type MINIMUM 91 OCTANE.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[vought]

Octane in the UK and in the US are computed differently. The US uses a combined average motor octane number (MON) and research octane number (RON). At US pumps, the dsplayed octane number is RON+MON/2=AKI, or Anti-Knock Index, but most marketing refers to this AKI as the "octane" number of the fuel

The UK and most other countries uses RON as the displayed octane number at the pump, which is usually a couple of points higher than the averaged US AKI.

For example, a 97 Octane gasoline in the UK is roughly equivalent to the 93 octane gasolines in our pumps here in the ol' US.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[vought]

I can drive 800 miles and not leave Texas.


One of best road signs in the US, seen upon crossing into texas from Louisiana:

El Paso: 968 miles

Most people do a double take when I tell them there's only one state between Louisiana and New Mexico. Then they do a triple take when I tell them that Los Angeles is east of Reno.

Sadly, most people in the US are no good at geography, just as tragic, most other citizens of the world can't comprehend why we all seem to have cars and love to drive; it's because our country is freakin' huge. Not that it makes our wasteful US driving habits any more acceptable, but hey - you gotta get there somehow.

Uh, and to stay on topic, we also like to carry big, fast memory cards in our big, fast cameras in our big, fast cars.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

While premium gasoline has indeed undergone more refining steps, it's no purer than standard gasoline. The aftermarket additions of detergents and such are the same.

Instead, what the refining does is, like what has been stated, give you a slightly harder to burn mixture of gasoline. Specifically, it's harder to detonated from compression alone.

As for the earlier 'blown up enough cars', have you ever thought that it might be that they aren't designed for the (more expensive) gas you're putting in them? Carbon deposits aren't good.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Joebert]

I still don't understand how you guys/gals can sit here & tell me that they act differently in a motor, yet they're the same. It just doesn't make sense.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[modecx]

Gas? No. You can go anywhere and get premium gas...

Oil? Now that's a different story! Yeah, you gotta use Ferrari oil, at $70 bucks a quart, if you like your warranty... So happens that the oil is Ferrari red, too. Go figure.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Guysmiley777]

If the timing wasn't backed off it would detonate the fuel, which means it explodes instead of burns

Wrong. If the timing wasn't backed off it would predetonate. In other words it would detonate before the spark plug fired and possibly before the piston has went past TDC. Which is a Bad Thing because it will harm bearings, valves, etc. When operating normally, the fuel/air mixture still explodes, set off by a spark from the cylinder's spark plug.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[jrumney]

Actually, the European and American methods of measuring octane are a little different. The end result is about the same for what you put in the engine.

Regular gasoline in the US is equivalent to 92 octane measured by the European method. Regular petrol in the UK is 95 octane, 92 is what we put in the lawnmower.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[squiggleslash]

Bullshit, not if your engine is designed so that it needs high octane.

I'm trying to work out why I've just been mod-bombed when the only replies to my comment are by three people who clearly didn't read it (or else just want an argument.) So you're saying engines specifically designed for high octane fuels require high octane fuels and don't get carbon build-up huh?

Well you could knock me down with a feather. I'd never have guessed that in a million years. Thanks Captain Obvious.

Next up: how it's completely incorrect to say a standard US 100W lightbulb needs a little under 1A of power , Because some lightbulbs are built for 220V.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[squiggleslash]

How the fuck did the parent get moderated informative?

Probably because it represents the prevailing consensus and is by and large true.

As a car gets older, it does not need higher octane fuel. The idea that even a severe case of combustion-chamber carbon buildup could cause a measurable increase in compression ratio is silly. As a car ages, its compression ratio tends to decrease due to ring blow-by, and carbon buildup preventing the valves from sealing well.

Well, this guy disagrees with you. To quote:

Don't knock sensors make it hard to tell when an old car needs higher-octane gas? Years ago, when your beater started pinging on grades or under acceleration, that was the sign that carbon had built up in the cylinders, increasing compression, and it was time to switch to high-test

As I don't know you from Adam, I'll go with the above. Older cars with carbon build-up will need higher octane fuel. (This doesn't mean I think you should immediately start sticking high octane gas in your '97 Corolla, it means I think if your engine's knocking in your 1971 Dodge, you should be using a higher octane gas, and the reason it pings now and didn't years ago is almost certainly carbon build-up.

3-Higher performance cars often need higher octane fuel because they run at a higher compression ratio, run hotter, and therefore have an increased likelihood of pre-ignition

That's probably correct, and doesn't contradict anything I said.

4-If you car was designed for 87 octane, and it is knocking during acceleration, that is NOT good, and is often a sign of a timing issue you should fix, not mask with higher octane fuel.

While this may be the case, again, the prevailing consensus seems to be use the minimum octane fuel that doesn't result in knocking.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[tomstdenis]

I take the bus. :-)

Tom

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[jcostom]

No, most every gas station I have been to in my life sells "regular", "silver", and "premium" gas. Have you never bought gas before?

Spoken like someone who doesn't know that gas used to contain lead, and it was referred to as "regular gas". You used to go to the pump and get regular, unleaded or unleaded premium. At least that's my recollection of my early youth (born in 1972).

Of course, nobody sells regular gas any longer, so plain old unleaded has now assumed the name "regular".

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[ottothecow]

also because our gas is so low octane we cant up the engine compression which would allow us to get more power out of our engines (and thus the same power out of smaller and more efficient engines).

And its just not as high quality as many european gasolines...which translates to worse efficiency. My VW gets 10-15 less mpg than the UK version of the same car...

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[modecx]

Then they do a triple take when I tell them that Los Angeles is east of Reno.


However, that's almost understandable. To most people in the world, Nevada contains nothing more than the Las Vegas strip, the Hoover Dam and Area 51... And everyone knows those are east of Los Angeles.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, try driving from Dallas to Miami. God, what a horrible drive. You get in the car in Dallas, drive for about 15 hours, finally cross the river into Pensacola (westernmost city in Florida)... and realize you're barely halfway to Miami, and still have a hellish 14-18 hour drive through some of North America's worst sustained gridlock.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Shanep]

High octane gasoline has been refined more - it is just a better product.

Is there somthing wrong with that ?
I don't know about everyone else, but I like better products.

You did not read the pdf.

High octane gasoline has been refined more - it is just a better product.

Is a heading under myths.

Additional refining steps are used to increase the octane; however, these additional steps do not necessarily make the gasoline a "better" product for all engines.

Is the response to the myth. Showing that high octane gasoline is NOT "a better product", but rather it might be a more appropriate product for some specific engines.

Would you put petrol in your deisel engine if someone told you that petrol was a better product?

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[heinousjay]

Yeah, but then you have to drive a Volkswagen. Nothing is worth that kind of punishment.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Shanep]

I still don't understand how you guys/gals can sit here & tell me that they act differently in a motor, yet they're the same. It just doesn't make sense.

Maybe this will make sense for you then:

High octane petrol in normal engine, bad.
High octane petrol in high compression engine, good.

Low octane petrol in normal engine, good.
Low octane petrol in high compression engine, bad.

It is not about quality, it is about suitability.

Potentially the same quality, but each has different pros and cons. Low octane can explode under the higher pressure of a high compression engine, before the spark can ignite it at the correct time (like the way diesel explodes without a spark plug). So low octane fuel is bad for high compression engines.

By the same token, people who think high octane fuel equates to high "quality" fuel and use it in a normal compression engine, are actually getting no benefit from what the high octane fuel provides (lack of knocking, when knocking was not occuring in the first place). Yet they are getting an added build up of carbon, which may actually eventually lead to knocking (knocking can occur from exploded fuel or from fuel ignited from hot carbon build-up). So they prematurely got a problem and all for no benefit. So with this so called "higher quality fuel" they got a problem with their engine.

High octane fuel for high compression engines.
Lower octane fuel for non high compression engines.

Different fuels for different engines. Just like petrol versus diesel. High octane is not about higher quality of the product itself, it is about suitablity to high compression engines.

I must have missed the lecture, perhaps it's time for you to move on if you've discussed it enough times before ?

Perhaps it is time for you to start listening to other people.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[ottothecow]

Pretty much every VW at the dealership I worked at has one of those stickers asking for premium fuel (even the piddly 2.0s).

Guess what, that tank out back had straight 87 octane gas and never anything different. It wasnt a problem for the mechanics because they knew that even the high compression 1.8 turbos didnt need more than the 87. At the worst you would lose some power if the anti-knock had to kick in and retard the timing. There was never a need for higher grade fuel unless someone had aftermarket parts (anything from a chip, to a bigger turbo to new cams). Of course there can be an advantage to the increased octane rating because you can run the smaller engines at higher compression for better efficiency but the manufacturers cant take that risk because they know people will just pump it full of regular.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[kasin]

> Sadly, most people in the US are no good at geography, just as tragic, most other citizens of the world can't comprehend why we
> all seem to have cars and love to drive; it's because our country is freakin' huge. Not that it makes our wasteful US driving
> habits any more acceptable, but hey - you gotta get there somehow.

Ahhh. Americans and your tiny states.

Area
Area of Texas: 700,000 km2 (268,000 square miles)
Area of Western Australia: 2,600,000 km2

Population density
Texas: 30.75/km2
Western Australia: 0.79/km2

5 out of 8 Australian states and territories are bigger than Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_st ates_and_territories_by_area

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Spoke]

You mention pre-ignition, while your parent mentions detonation, and it's important to note that while many people use the 2 terms interchangably, technically they mean 2 different types of undesired combustion. I guess I could say: "How the fuck did the parent get modded informative?" too. :P

Pre-ignition is usually caused by localized hot-spots in the combustion chamber which cause the air/fuel mixture to light off well before the normal spark would light off the mixture. This means that the combustion event really gets going when the piston is still moving up instead of having started moving down, this really increases cylinder pressure and temps and the end result is typically a hole in the piston as it melts under the extreme conditions. Low octane fuel does not typically cause pre-ignition.

Detonation occurs well after the air/fuel mixture was lit by the spark plug. It is caused by unburned pockets of the air/fuel mixture spontaneously combusting due to heat and pressure. High octane fuel resists this spontaneous combustion better than low octane fuel. When detonation occurs, you get mini-explosions in the combustion chamber which spikes cylinder temperatures and pressures. If the detonations occurs under light load, nothing bad usually happens, as most engines will tolerate light detonation for quite a long time as the spike in pressure from detonation under light load can be absorbed by the engine. However, detonation under heavy load can quickly cause broken ring lands or damaged engine bearings.

Further complicating the matter, prolonged detonation often leads to pre-ignition, as the detonation raises cylinder temps causing a localized hot-spot which in turn can cause pre-ignition.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Suddenly_Dead]

Yeah, I think we use a similiar thing occasionally in Canada, though most people still use MPG because the popular car magazines and all that cultural nonsense are from the States.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[FinestLittleSpace]

Yep, you gotta hate driving one of the best constructed car brands in the world.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Kremmy]

the Renesis Wankel engine in Mazda RX-8 is a 1.3L engine that puts out 247HP.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[dascandy]

> Where I live in the US, regular gas (I think it's 87? 88?) is $2.89/ gallon on a good day, up to about $3.05. My car's pretty gas efficient, and I get 300 miles on about $35. My mother's car costs closer to $60 for the same distance.

Where I live in the Netherlands, regular gas (95) is 1.529 euro per liter. I drive an Opel Astra (Vauxhall for you english people) and I think I'd have to fill it up every 300-400 miles. That costs me 60 euros each time then.

Dear US, you're not having high oil prices. Go back to sleep (or buy an efficient car for crying out loud).

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[dascandy]

Except that both firkins and furlongs are imperial sizes, and being contrasted to the SI on the page you gave.

Still, there are two. Either liters per 100 kilometers or kilometers per liter.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's apples to oranges, really. The Renesis engines are rotary engines (i.e., they use rotors), while the 1.4l VW is a reciprocating piston engine (i.e. a run-of-the-mill inline four).

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[LordVader717]

A small comparison:

lets say your car gets about 25 mpg. You say it's pretty efficient.

In Europe, an "efficient" car is one that does under 3 liters per 100 kilometers, or about 80 mpg.

Here in Germany, gas costs about 6 USD/gallon.

But you're still paying about 1.6 times what somebody would be paying here.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[DMPilgrim]

5 out of 8 Australian states and territories are bigger than Texas.

Yes, but, like Canada, everyone in Australia lives along the edges. There are millions of square km of Australia devoid of humans.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[aersixb9]

Bullshit vs. Personal Experience:

Sometimes, when information conflicts with what a person already believes, they lie about their personal experiences or knowledge to cover up their error. It's easier than changing their mind. Apparently both moderators and bullshit spewers hate it when accurate censored information is posted that fucks up their ways of understanding things, such as that you don't disassemble already constructed things, or that cars are exact and fragile. Metal on metal wears very slowly, train brakes are metal on metal, and although they make a noise they do not break. All this shit that the government legislates companies to make breaks, the term is planned obsoleteness, and it has been around since the 50's when multiple companies formed monopolies on certain products, then claimed that those products (such as cars) are very exact and fragile, and any random person building them would create a dangerous situation, when in fact a metal engine, metal & solid rubber wheels, metal breaks, and a metal drivetrain/tranmission creates a car that does not break, even when crashed or hit with a weapon. (The second part actually depends upon the weapon) These are the same people that banned most aircraft, when an aircraft (specifically a glider or hot air balloon) is much easier to manufacture than a car, and the powered airplanes are of approximately equal manufacturing difficulty, without the need of roads. It is also possible to land in a parking space with an airplane that has an appropriate wing surface area / weight ratio, especially on stretched canvas airplanes, banned by the government since the 40's.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[kasin]

Exactly. You want to get anywhere, you have to drive along the edge, because only idiots take the 'short cut' of driving across the middle.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[StikyPad]

Since the overwhelming majority of driving is within 10 miles of the home (90% iirc), any land mass greater than 314 sq.mi. will provide roughly equivelant annual driving distances. Case in point. (Honolulu is 1/10th the size of the UK).

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[richlv]

actually, here it is pretty hard to obtain 92, so everybody uses 95 in lawnmovers, chainsaws etc.

there are some stations that provide 92, but those are mostly of interest to owners of old soviet cars.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Pusene]

You're lucky. When I was young, I had to take the bicyckle.

Re:Regular gas in a Ferrari?

[Firethorn]

We're not contesting that it's not different. What we're saying is that all of them are effectivly the same purity level, containing the same additives and detergents. What is changed in premium is the mix of hydrocarbons, adding ones that are slightly harder to burn.

This difference can lead to increased carbon deposits, which can cause problems later on. 99.9% of cars on the road are optimized for regular, so that's what's best to burn in them. Putting premium in doesn't ward off the mechanic, instead, it can actually lead to having to visit him sooner. Meanwhile, you're paying ~$.10 more a gallon, which quickly adds up.

Well, at my usage, it shouldn't cost me more than $50/year. But still, that's a nice dinner out.

20 pages of spam

[Anonymous Coward]

this is nothing more than spam, 20 pages of fluff (with 5+ adverts per page) in order to sell a few memory cards on a website called "trusted reviews", yeah right

no wonder digg is getting popular

Re:20 pages of spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you insane? Digg is plagued with SPAM. Its like Slashdot but 10x worse.

Re:20 pages of spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it would be in their own interest to make an article which is worth the time reading. It sounds like an interesting topic, but it is not worth looking through 20 pages, so less people will read and even see the adverts.

Not a good test

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, look at that: A 133x card performed faster than a 120x card!

This is stupid. It looks like the readers/writers were tested more than the actual card was. Your analogy is flawed - This isn't a test of the fuel, it's a test of the car.

Continuing the analogy: If you are looking for car performance, what is truly the deciding factor? The gas or the car? I can put jet fuel in my civic, but it won't make a difference - not a positive one, at least. Conversely, my high-performace ducati that supposedly wants 95 octane runs great on the low-octane gas, and has done so without fouling the plugs for over 15k miles. High octane gas doens't make you go any faster, it's just more resistant to pre-detonation.

Re:Not a good test

[rossdee]

Jrt fuel is not gasoline. The civic probably won't run at all.

I think you might be neaning AVGAS - higfh octane gasoline that is used in piston engine planes.

Re:Not a good test

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might be neaning AVGAS - higfh octane gasoline that is used in piston engine planes.

and is 100% leaded, if he put that in his civic, he might as well throw the civic away, what with the cost of buying a new catalytic converter.

Always performance, never durability

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everybody test performance, but nobody tests durability? What good is a ginormous flash card that stores your images in a fraction of a second when it trashes the FAT after some 10000 writes because the flash cells can't take anymore writes. There go the once in a lifetime shots.

Re:Always performance, never durability

[gowen]

If you take 10,000 photos between taking a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo and backing it up onto a tougher media, you pretty much deserve to lose all your work. The biggest loss of digital camera images are caused by loss/theft of the camera, and user error (accidental deletion). Media failure doesn't even register on the scale.

Re:Always performance, never durability

[Anonymous Coward]

A 2GB card stores about 250 raw 8Mpixel images. 10000 images means you've filled the card 40 times. Granted, it's not something that a casual photographer needs to worry about, but neither do those users care whether the card writes 5 or 15MB/s. After a couple thousand pictures, safely copied to your computer and backed up, the card will eat all pictures since the last format. If those pictures were the ones where your friend said "yes" to the love of his live, paying attention to the longevity of the storage medium might suddenly seem more important than how fast the card stored the images that are now lost.

Re:Always performance, never durability

[Shanep]

Why does everybody test performance, but nobody tests durability? What good is a ginormous flash card that stores your images in a fraction of a second when it trashes the FAT after some 10000 writes because the flash cells can't take anymore writes. There go the once in a lifetime shots.

From what I have read, the fast cards are also the most durable. They tend to be made of the single layer CF. It's the really large but slower multi-layer CF which don't last long.

Re:Always performance, never durability

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1GB Toshiba SD-Card in front of me which didn't make it to its first birthday does register on my scale.

Re:Always performance, never durability

[modeless]

Let's run the numbers. Flash lifetimes are on the order of 100,000 write cycles, and to write over an entire 4GB card takes over 10 minutes. 10 minutes * 100,000 = over 2 years of 24/7 use! Even if the card was somehow defective and had its life cut by 1/10, it would take 80 days to find out. You could try writing to one small section of the card but you would have to thwart the wear leveling algorithms employed by the cards and readers, and you wouldn't be testing the whole card.

Let's look at a realistic usage scenario. Say you are a prolific photographer and end up overwriting your 4GB card once every day on average. With the defective 10,000 cycles card, it would still last 27 years of daily use. For 100,000 cycles, that's 2.7 centuries. Furthermore, as I understand it, a failure of Flash is a failure to erase, leaving your data intact. Is it really any wonder that nobody cares about Flash durability?

Re:Always performance, never durability

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash memory with a lifetime of 10000 erase/write cycles isn't defective, just cheaper MLC-flash. Also, due to the stupid choice of FAT16/32 for photography applications, some sectors are written every time you take a picture. Compact flash can have wear leveling, but is not required to. All theory aside, cards do die. Just because it hasn't happened to you yet, doesn't mean it never happens.

19 Pages?

[gfxguy]

19 Pages? Ay Caramba!

Hint: skip to page 18 for the conclusions.

You don't get any more professional than padding your 3 page article to 19 pages with lines like this (from the conclusion):

You could say we tested a number of things.

Yeah, you could say that. One of those things was my patience.

Re:19 Pages?

[sam1am]

Yeah, and there's the whole "using a stopwatch to time transfers from the computer to the card" thing..

Re:19 Pages?

[n8k99]

Oi! this article reminded me that I need to export the photos from my camera!

Re:19 Pages?

[6Yankee]

I thought the sheer number of pages was the "torture test".

Strangely enough, I read 1/19 of TFA.

Re:19 Pages?

[Cicero382]

Yeah! I totally agree!

A few points:

1. What is it with these long drawn-out reviews?
2. And why the huge graphics?
3. And why do they seem to assume that we're not interested in price?

OK, (1) is probably so they can put adverts on each page and get revenue. On the other hand they're not nearly as bad as a certain RP whose first page about a robotic snake contained no fewer than 17 ads. On the gripping hand, this article had about 4 ads per page which works out at 76 ads in total. Right! Definitely about showing ads, then. Good thing I have Adblock on my browser - eat my dirt RP, Mwahahahah!

As for (2), I still don't get it. The images are about 50k each which adds up to.. Ahhh, who cares? A lot more than it should be. Do you *really* want to be able to read the small print on the packaging? Thought not.

But my venom is reserved for point 3.

Now I, like most (all?) of you, buy a fair amount of kit. I *always* have the financial side in mind, even when I'm trying to build a super-duper computation server. There's *always* a trade off between price and performance. So why didn't the final grid show a cost/benefit breakdown? Actually this is a gripe I have with a lot of reviews in both printed and online reviews. For example, why not present the cost-per-gig as part of the conclusion in a disk review? Or cost-per-throughput MB, or... you get the idea.

BTW. If anyone knows of a publication/site who *do* present their finding like this - please let us know.

Ahh. Finished my daily rant - I feel better now.

Why people shop for price

[timeOday]

When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.

Do they give better colors?

[AmIAnAi]

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

You have to color the card with a green marker to get that sort of improvement.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would one card give warmer colors or cleaner pictures? Everybody knows that digital doesn't have these problems. Watch out for jitter though, especially with the bigger CF cards and contacts that aren't oxygen-free.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[mssymrvn]

Only if you purchase my special green marker for $19.99 and write a green line around the edges to prevent electron scattering. Those stray electrons can really show up in photos and you wouldn't want that. You also get higher definition too. Yeah, that's it!

Ugh.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[Rob the Bold]

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering. Of course if you work in black and white, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and use the cheap stuff. But with color, you don't want multipath blurring your color signals together. And this gets even more important as you shoot multiple frames per second.

And the same thing goes with your storage media. If you work in high resolution color, you need a RAID. That way, you can spread the put the color streams on different physical media to prevent color-bleed. This is even more critical with digital photography, just a one-bit bleed from one pixel to another can ruin a great photo.

So, by all means, get a cheap card if you are going analog black-and-white. But you get what you pay for if you are shooting high-res digital color.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[Wesley Felter]

Is Monster Cable making flash cards now?

Re:Do they give better colors?

[fermion]

Precisely. The analogy and review is fatally flawed.

One tends to pay more for a camera to gain improved optics. I know some will go for higher digital zoom, or pure megpaixels, but those are not the ones that are going to necessarily going to understand anything other than a 32X on the memory card. So for quality, the memory card is not going matter. The only time the card will matter is when taking a rapid sequence of pictures,and even then the limit is often camera based, i.e how quickly it can compress the data. OTOH, for raw format a faster card does seem to matter.

Re:Do they give better colors?

[cob666]

That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering.

For special effects, cross the RBG connectors on the USB cable.

I dont care for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

that much. I got a 512SD card in my digital camera and personally dont care if it takes 5 or 10 minutes to copy it all over to the computer. It's not like the card is a huge bottleneck when taking pictures, a second after the click I'm ready to go again. I belive if there was a problem at that end people would care but not when you're just copying them.
Reliability OTOH is a very different deal but I didnt feel like shelling out another 50$ just to get something with a fancy brand on it. My Ultra-X Media Store is still fine after 3 years.

As often as it happens...

[dud83]

When I buy a Ferrari I usually sell it straight away. Then proceed to buy the latest monster setup from Alienware, take a journey around the world, put half of what is left on a high-interest bank account, and donate the other half to Médecins Sans Frontières or the Red Cross.
So there you have it! :p Straight on topic hehe...

Not a proper torture test I think...

[KokorHekkus]

More of a high end performance test.

There was one proper torture test done by the UK Digital Camera Shopper magazine where they dipped in cola, run through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled and then for sport hit with a sledgehammer and then nailed to a tree. They didn't survive the last two tests though...

Wonderfully resilient stuff I'd say.

Couldn't find the article freely availabe on the mag, just a ref at BBC news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3939333.stm

Re:Not a proper torture test I think...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think that makes sense. I think it also makes sense to set up a script to test the number of read/write cycles, write 0xAA bytes to the entire crard, verify, write 0x55s, verify and count how many full write cycles it can take before it fails.

Re:Not a proper torture test I think...

[fridgemagnet]

"Brainiacs" on Sky went better than that - they did a piece where they submitted various removable storage devices to all sorts of abuse, including, at the end, firing them out of a cannon at a wall. IIRC the SD card, even when it was pretty much blown in half by the cannon, could still be read, though admittedly it needed a lab to do so.

check your speed

[v1]

What blows my mind in this issue is not the memory cards, but the cameras themselves. A friend of mine just bought a new Canon camera. Sorry I don't recall the model, but it was the newest 8 megapixel SLR they had. Nice camera, he paid a lot for it too. It takes full motion movies. He took my advice and got a 1gb card for it. So we take a few movies and some pictures and plug the camera into their new iMac. And wait. and wait. and wait some more. My god, why is this going so slow? It's been 10 minutes and it's not even 10% done!

The computer shows the camera is hanging off the USB FS (full speed, 12mbps) bus. Why? Is there a problem with the computer? Get out the manual for the camera. Oh.. my.. god... the camera is USB full speed, not high speed. (this is a difference between 12 mbps and 480 mbps for USB cable download speed!) I had to look in several places to confirm the horror. What were they thinking? This camera takes 200mb movies. That takes HOURS at that speed to download.

So we shuttle back down to the camera store and bought him a nice firewire card reader. Back home, we dump then entire card in 10 minutes, movies and pictures included.

This is inconvenient but gets the job done. There is simply no excuse to pay thousands for a camera that takes movies, and have the manufacturers shave a little off the price of manufacturing by substituting a slow USB chip in the camera. And that's all it is, one teeny little chip they just picked the slow one over the fast one. (they are functionally interchangeable, there is no need to redesign the camera) At the bulk they buy chips that can't have saved them more than a dollar per unit.

I have owned two Canon cameras myself and then there is this one. They have performed very well in all cases as excellent digital cameras. But incidents like this make me seriously consider changing brands. If that would have been my camera purchase, it would have gone right back to the store where it came from. Go to store, go directly to store, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Re:check your speed

[CrazyTalk]

I have a Cannon digital camera too. Takes great pics, but the USB interface died altogether after about a year. Had to buy a CF card adapter for my PC and load the pics that way.

Re:check your speed

[Cheile]

You're probably talking about the S3 or S2 as no SLR will do movies as the mirror would have to bounce up and down 24 times a second.

Regardless of which one your friend has it seems to be that the Mac is not correctly identifying it as both the S2 and S3 are USB 2.0 capable. (As are the actual SLR cameras that Canon has).

$.02

Re:check your speed

[Bake]

This is finally starting to change.

The relatively new Canon SLR XT has a USB 2.0 High Speed interface.

Re:check your speed

[swillden]

the newest 8 megapixel SLR they had... It takes full motion movies.

Stop right there... none of Canon's SLRs can take movies. The burst shooting mode has been used to make sort of stop-motion movies, but that's not full motion by any stretch of the imagination. Also, all of Canon's current SLR line has hi-speed USB.

So what camera are you talking about, anyway, since it's obviously not a Canon dSLR?

Re:check your speed

[Anonymous Coward]

a) As already stated by others, no digital SLR to date has had the ability to record movies.

b) Out of models that are somewhat SLR-shaped, Canon has only one camera in the region of eight megapixels. That is the PowerShot Pro 1.

Hence, you're complaining about a camera that is over two years out of date (announced February 9th, 2004), and whose specifications are clearly listed on Canon's site.

If you can't be bothered to read the specifications and confirm the camera meets your needs before buying it, why should a store have to take it back?

Re:check your speed

[maxume]

I downloaded about 75 megabytes of music onto my mp3 player this morning. As far as I know, both it and my computer are usb1.1, so it couldn't have been any faster than your connection. It took 3 minutes. You did something else wrong.

Re:check your speed

[Anonymous Coward]

There's actually no technical reason for DSLR cameras to not be able to record movies. They could lock the mirror down and use the display for framing like all the point and shoot cameras. It's just "beneath them".

Re:check your speed

[jedrek]

I know the Canon line-up pretty well, they have three 8mpx DSLRs - 350D (Rebel XT); 20D (discontinued); 30D - and all of them have USB 2.0, none of them does more than 5fps. The last camera I can think of that might not have had USB 2.0 was the 1Ds or 1Ds MkII - it had firewire instead.

Re:check your speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Full Speed USB is 12 Mbps and still technically USB 2.0. So just because something says USB 2.0 it doesn't mean it's capable of doing more than 12Mbps

Re:check your speed

[mspohr]

It's odd that the SLRs don't take movies. I have a small Canon PowerShot SD500 "point and shoot" camera. It has 7.1 megapixels and it takes movies at 30fps and 640x480. It will run up to the full capacity of the memory card.

Re:check your speed

[Bassman59]

Full Speed USB is 12 Mbps and still technically USB 2.0. So just because something says USB 2.0 it doesn't mean it's capable of doing more than 12Mbps

Yes, yes, YES! Mod parent UP.

Re:check your speed

[radish]

As does the 30D, the 5D, and the 20D (released in 2004). The reason older cameras often had slower connections was that the CF cards of the time couldn't keep up, so there was no point.

Re:check your speed

[Tim C]

Indeed. 1GB is 1024MB; 12Mbps is 1.5MBps.

1024/1.5 is ~680s, or a touch under 12 minutes.

If it took 10 minutes to transfer about 100MB, something else is indeed wrong.

Re:check your speed

[radish]

SLRs work very differently to a P&S. They have a mechanical mirror and shutter which opens and closes for each frame. Doing that at 24fps isn't impossible (movie cameras do it) but it's a big design change (extra weight, cost, size etc) for a feature that few SLR users are likely to want. If I want to shoot movies, I'll take a camcorder.

Re:check your speed

[mspohr]

Thanks for this information. I hadn't thought about the mirror. That would be some tremendous flapping to have the thing going at 30fps. They could probably get around it by using an LCD screen to display the image and just keeping the mirror up.

Re:check your speed

[flink]

Actually most (film) movie cameras have a rotary disc shutter. It's a mirrored disc with a slice cut out of it that spins in front of the film, so 1 rotation = 1 exposure. When it's not reflecting light onto the film, it's reflecting it into the viewfinder so you can see what's gong on.

I imagine video and DV cameras don't even have a shutter, but I really don't know. I guess it depends on whether the have a dSLR CCD or the kind that's in point-and-shoots.

Re:check your speed

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need to flap the mirror 30 times/sec, or to actually operate the shutter to shoot low-quality FMV, you could just switch the sensor on/off and keep the mirror locked. The real problem is that with the mirror up there's no way of knowing what you're shooting at and, BTW, DSLR are usually used by professionals or semi-pros who really don't need a half-assed FMV-shooting feature

Re:check your speed

[swillden]

It's odd that the SLRs don't take movies.

I think there are a few reasons, probably none of them compelling on its own, but enough taken together:

• I believe the autofocus mechanism of SLRs requires the mirror to be in the down position, but to get light to the sensor, the mirror has to be up. So a video mode would have to lock the sensor up out of the way, disabling the viewfinder and the autofocus. Videos would have to be focused manually, and composed using the LCD display.
• Most SLR lenses and cameras are designed to achieve much narrower depths of field (DOF), especially at lower light levels requiring larger apertures, whereas the tiny sensors provide a wide DOF. A narrow DOF means only a small portion of the scene is in focus, so controlling focus would be very important. A narrow DOF is also a feature of some professional video camera lenses, but shooting good video with a narrow DOF requires very, very good cameramen. In bright daylight, a dSLR could use a narrow aperture and get a reasonably wide DOF, but still narrower than most P&S cameras. Taking good video would be difficult, especially without autofocus.
• There's not much demand. People who spend $1K+ on dSLR systems (yes the entry-level cameras cost less than that, but try getting even an inexpensive dSLR plus a couple of decent lenses for less than $1K) are buying cameras that produce extremely high-quality stills. Being able to also produce low-quality video clips isn't useful to many of them, if it in any way compromises the design of the still camera. If they want video, they'll buy a good video camera. If you're carrying around a bulky SLR plus a bag of lenses anyway, it's not a big deal to throw a compact video camera in there as well, and it'll do better job.

Re:check your speed

[mczak]

The 300D (Rebel) and 10D only had USB 1.1. Though the numbers of the GP don't add up anyway, a 200MB movie would still get downloaded in roughly 6 minutes (assuming roughly 600KB/s effective transfer rate which is reasonable for USB 1.1, unless it's a really really poor implementation), so if it took "HOURS" I suppose there was indeed some trouble with the USB port.

But...

[NexFlamma]

The majority of memory card sales go to the general public. The people who have $200 digital cameras and cheap memory cards. These people dont need to down/upload massive amounts of files in which they might actually notice the speed increases shown by these fancy cards.

Sure, they might be useful to high end photogs, but there is a reason they don't sell as well as we all think they should.

Re:But...

[Hal_Porter]

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.

It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in software.

http://www.levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html

The idea is that you can sell a generic performance product $x and a 'high end product for discerning consumers' at $2x. The high end product may actually have a lower performance for price one, but everyone wants to a be a 'discerning consumer', 'early adopter' and so on.

Is there really any difference between someone who willingly overspends by several hundred percent on ultra high end storage devices, so they can transfer the few pictures they take a year a second or so quicker and someone who does the same on sports shoes so they can pose in the mall?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Costco which is geared toward the average consumer, sells the Sandisk Ultra II 1GB SD card for $42-47. That is a competitive price for any brand of 1GB card without a rebate attached. A quick scan at worstbuy shows a regular PNY brand 1GB on sale for $30 (I'd bet my left testicle that they are out of stock in the store as all bestbuy sale items seem to be), a PNY "ultra speed" model for $80, and the same Sandisk card at Costco for $75.
There is a wide range of prices at various retailers but you can find a higher speed models in the same price range.

Re:But...

[Shanep]

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price.

The expensive high performance cards are also the ones with the 1 million erase cycles, versus the 10,000 erase cycles of the cheap CF.

So who is smarter? The person who saved 25%-75% or the person who bought the card which will last 100 times longer?

Re:But...

[NexFlamma]

Do you really think anyone actually approaches that 10,000 erase cycle limit before a newer, shinier gadget comes out and they upgrade?

Re:But...

[Shanep]

Do you really think anyone actually approaches that 10,000 erase cycle limit before a newer, shinier gadget comes out and they upgrade?

I would prefer to shoot RAW. If I can get 100 photos on a card, then I can do that 100 times with the 10,000 erase cycle CF. If I buy a big, fast CF, I would be happy to spend the extra to know that it will outlast the camera, especially since the large CF cards are still pretty expensive.

But for most people, probably not. Good point.

I also go for the higher erase cycle CF because I use them in firewalls.

Re:But...

[NexFlamma]

Ok, let's assume you were to use a card with a 10,000 erase cycle cap.

If you took those 100 RAW picture images and then erased them every day, it would take you roughly 27 and a half years to run out of erase cycles.

Unless you're a total techno-packrat, you're going to have upgraded by then.

If you're still using the same memory card 27 years later, I think you're a member of the wrong website.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every picture taken causes an erase-write cycle on the FAT sectors. Unfortunately the ancient FAT16 and recently FAT32 have become the standard filesystems in digital photography. It would have been better to use one of the filesystems that are designed to be used on media with limited write cycles. Unless the card autonomously remaps "old" sectors, a 10000 write cycle card will stop working after about 10000 pictures. 10000 pictures is not as much as it looks.

Re:But...

[Shanep]

Ok, let's assume you were to use a card with a 10,000 erase cycle cap.

If you took those 100 RAW picture images and then erased them every day, it would take you roughly 27 and a half years to run out of erase cycles.

Yes, you're right, my math was very broken. For some silly reason I was forgetting that the erase cycles are per cell/block and not per card.

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm losing it! ; )

Re:But...

[Hal_Porter]

Not if they use wear levelling they don't. Each 512 byte sector can be anywhere on the physical media, and there's a clever translation mechanism to keep track of this. So the FAT filesystem may write sector 1 very frequently, sector 1 moves all over the physical media.

So rather than 10000 pictures, you should get 10000*(Media_Size) / (Picture_Size)

Which gives some fairly non intuitive lifetimes

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the theory. Real world cards do die. The implementation of wear levelling is up to the manufacturer. It's not mandatory. I don't blame you for believing the hype, because most people don't use their cards frequently enough to break them and unfortunately nobody test durability, so it is a surprise when it happens to you.

Memory card torture test?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that? Barry Bonds in front of a grand jury?

Simple answer

[Anonymous Coward]

"So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?"

Because if your camera can write 1MB/s, it doesn't matter if your memory card has theoretical write speed of 1MB/s, 2MB/s, 4MB/s or 10MB/s. You will get 1MB/s of write performance in any case.

It's interesting that they tested memory cards with Canon EOS 1D Mark II camera that costs $3500. I wonder how the results would look if they would've used $350 camera instead.

Meh.

[Unknown Poltroon]

I was interested in checking out this review, then i saw i would have to page through 20 pages of, well, pages, to make sure i hit their quoat of ads. No thanks, ill read up on fast memory at somone elses site.

Yes, i am aware that half the pages on the internet are like this, and i am also aware that the website owners need to make money. I dont care.

Re:Meh.

[tgeller]

You must have missed the well-labeled drop-down menu that lets you jump directly to whatever page you want. :-P I checked out the intro, the SD roundup, and the conclusions with no intermediate pages. Done!

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Huh? If it's such an abuse, why were the options put there?

Might not be testing something useful

[ZorbaTHut]

I, personally, buy a camera with the goal of taking good-quality pictures. I buy a memory card with the goal of storing a lot of stuff. I will admit that transfer speed is on the priority list . . . it's just not very high on the priority list. So this isn't anything like "buying a Ferrari and putting normal gas in it". This is more like "buying a Ferrari and eating a McDonald's burger in it". It doesn't have much effect on what you bought the item primarily for.

(I mean, unless you get secret sauce on the seats. I think the analogy's broken down now, though.)

Not a good analogy

[slashkitty]

I have an expensive ($800) Digital Rebel XT 8MP camera. It doen't matter how slow of a card I put in it, it works great. It has it's own high speed cache to store like 8 pictures or so depending on settings, and write to the card seconds later. I can easily take a few shots a second, but, it's rare I need to shoot that. While some high end cameras have the write to card weakness, it's certainly not universal among the Ferrari Cameras. Those of you driving around in old yugos might need every bit of speed increase that you can get, you're better off getting a better camera though IMHO.

Re:Not a good analogy

[radish]

Agreed, for straight landscape or posed portrait photography a super fast card is only significant at the end of the day when you have to empty them all onto your PC. But if you're shooting things which won't sit stil (wildlife, sports, candid/street scenes) you'll make more use of burst shooting and at 5fps/8mp that's a lot of data. With a generic CF card I can shoot for maybe 20 shots until the buffer fills and it stops to write - with the Ultra 2 cards I usually use I can fill up an entire card without taking my finger off the trigger.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Commodity items

[Threni]

> why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

Because they do the same thing - store images - only cheaper. I don't care about the speed as long as my camera can talk to it. I don't take many pictures one after the other, and when I do the difference between a few miliseconds or whatever makes no difference to me. Anyway, most cameras, especially expensive ones, have an internal buffer that can handle the difference.

Re: hate to break it to you...

[OUWxGuesser]

Hate to break it to you, but DSLR's can't take full motion movies. Second of all, why are you downloading images tethered? Get a usb 2.0 card reader!

So what's wrong with my camera's recording?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know convenience is the only thing I should worry about but my camera's memory has beautiful saturation, 25 million pixels and proven image stability of over one hundred years; all in a package no bigger than a cassette of Kodachrome. Oh, wait...

Re:So what's wrong with my camera's recording?

[radish]

That's 36 shots in that package, and they cost at least $0.50 each when everything's included. When I was recently on Safari I took over 5000 shots in a week - with your materials that would have cost $2500 and filled up a pretty decent sized case. As it was it cost nothing (I already had the cards) and everything fitted on my laptop. Sure it's partly a matter of convenience but if I were using film I simply couldn't have taken the shots I did - film was expensive out there and in short supply, and luggage space severely limited. So in that particular case, shotting digital enabled me to take shots I wouldn't otherwise have got.

Re:So what's wrong with my camera's recording?

[EvanED]

There are times when each of film and digital have their place. I saw a rocket launch 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I decided to shoot it film, for two reasons. First, believe it or not, my film body (a Canon Elan 7) can shoot more rapidly than my digital body (Rebel XT) despite having the mechanical film advance. Second, film still has better dynamic range than digital, and the brightness difference between rocket exhaust and background had thrown off pictures I took of an earlier launch on the Rebel.

That said, every non-launch picture I took was on the Rebel, and I still haven't gotten around to dropping off the film shots. (I'm a bit worried that I abused the film too much in airport and customs x-rays, and don't want to get them back and see they're all fogged. Living in ignorance is better. ;-) And yeah, this is a perfect example of how you can give a guy beautiful equipment but if he's a dumbass you'll still get crap for pictures...)

Re:So what's wrong with my camera's recording?

[radish]

Agreed 100% - use the right tools for the job. But as time goes by, the number of jobs for which digital isn't suitable is diminishing. But having said that there will likely always be a reason to use film - just like I still use vinyl for DJing whilst using CD & FLAC for everything else.

Re:what ads?

[tomstdenis]

Why is there always someone who posts this comment. No shit, OMG PONIES firefox has ad blockers.

That doesn't mean putting a single page story on 20 pages is any more enjoyable to read.

You fucking karmatrolls are fucking annoying. You're like the little 6 yr old trying to get the attention of his parents or something. Shut the fuck up already until you have something insightful to say.

Tom

Crappy review

[nuggz]

So the review is 19 pages long mixes different incompatible formats.
And doesn't even review the fastest cards on the market. I think they're Sandisk Extreme III, but who knows I haven't seen a review.

I didn't think memory card speed mattered much, but then after playing with a high speed card on my camera it's quite nice to take pictures as fast as I can press the shutter for as long as I want.

Once you get used to taking photos of kids at a few fps, going back to a slower camera and card is quite painful.

Re:Crappy review

[RedBear]

And doesn't even review the fastest cards on the market. I think they're Sandisk Extreme III, but who knows I haven't seen a review.

Depends on your camera. In my Dimage A2 there is no difference between a Lexar 80X and a Sandisk Extreme III. On the other hand, in my Olympus Evolt E-300 after applying firmware update v1.2 suddenly the write speed with Extreme III cards shot up to almost 9.5MB/s. This was independently verified by at least two other people on the DPReview forums with the same camera, card and firmware, and I also have another E-300 body that I tested before and after. Every other card tested out at 4.5MB/s or slower, including Lexar's top-of-the-line 80X write-accelerated card. That's a difference of almost 2x. As far as I know the E-300 at that point was one of the fastest cameras in the digital SLR world, and it may still be. Unfortunately this speed is made largely useless due to a limited 4-shot buffer, but it does seriously cut down on wait times between bursts. If you're shooting moving subjects 5 seconds can make a big difference.

Of course, none of this really matters, and this review is fairly useless. As I mentioned above, the speed of the card depends highly on what camera you stick it in. In some cases the card that should be fastest actually performs more slowly than "slower" cards. Every other camera has a different controller chip and firmware, and speed results are far from consistent for any particular card. They use a Canon 1D MkII in their review, but your camera may only perform at half that speed, even with the fastest card. They also use a couple of card readers, but I've seen card readers that will read one card fast and another card that is fast in the camera will read incredibly slow in the card reader.

Because of these inconsistencies among hardware a review like this is basically useless, except as a way to know which cards to definitely stay away from. Personally from all I've read at the DPReview forums and my own experience with several different cameras, I am sticking with Sandisk Extreme III cards, and Ultra II cards for older devices that don't support the full speed of the Extreme III. But the only real way to find the best card for your camera is to go to those DPReview forums, find the forum relating to your brand of camera, and search for card speed posts from other people who own your camera. There will often be a long thread somewhere consolidating all the available results from other users.

My eyes, MY EYES!

[PietjeJantje]

Aaargh..19 small pages, each framed with 3 giant ads..I can't see! I can't read! the noise, the agony! Sorry, had to click away. So, what was the spammers conclusion about memory cards? How many ads can it hold?

Re:My eyes, MY EYES!

[tomstdenis]

Apparently his conclusion is he can't run a benchmark.

I didn't read the setup slide [honestly because I skipped to the conclusion] but he probably was testing in windows, with a stop watch and without a ram drive [on a USB 1.0 port...]

Conclusion, don't expect mad speed from SD or CF specially on cards which are max size [where RAID'ing isn't possible].

Tom

Re:My eyes, MY EYES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Although not an option with this article, slashdot submitters never submit the "printable" versions of websites. I, too, want to stab my eyes out with a rusty spoon when I see pages like this.

Pfffffft - Girlie camera

[slightlyspacey]

Expensive??? At $800??? Do you hear me laugh? I laugh at your little girlie toy camera :):). Now if you want a rather nice 39 MP medium format Hasselblad (H2D-39), B&H Video has one in stock right now for a bargain basement price of $29,994.95. I'm going to rush right over and pick one up before they run out.

Review sites ... anonymous posters ...

[tomstdenis]

Hey, how about this editors...

I'll pay for a slashdot account once you

1. Stop allowing "anonymous" people to post to ad ridden review sites

2. Stop posting stories about ad ridden review sites that split the story to 30 pages

3. Stop even thinking about talking about ad ridden review sites

4. Mirror the occasional real story so we can actually read it the same day the story is posted.

It's called "not selling out". If I give you money I want something of value in return. If I wanted a barrage of retarded stories I'd head to Fark. At least they don't pretend to be a "news" website.

Tom

Re:Review sites ... anonymous posters ...

[liuyunn]

at least the whole Ferrari analogy gave a whole lot of people something to talk about

Ferrari

[mnemonic_]

"Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so."

Actually, I would.

you joke, but with the F1 car, yes.

[SuperBanana]

You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari? What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?

Someone (with a lot of money) bought one of Schumacher's old F1 cars and yes, it was contractually required that the car only be run on a specific brand of fuel.

The article summary is pretty oblivious though- you run the octane your car requires, 95% of the time. Gasolene companies love to make you think that filling up your low-compression engine (that requires 89) with 94 octane will make it faster, or "clean" it more. All grades of gas from the same brand have the same level of detergents, generally...furthermore, each kind of detergent is good at removing certain deposits but leaves others, so you're actually best off rotating which brand you fill up with. If you're obsessed about it, just pop in a bottle of Techron cleaner one tank before your next oil-change; it's the stuff BMW, Audi, and others recommend, though they'll charge you a lot more for Techron in a BMW or Audi bottle.) Also, most gas is delivered from port by a distributor that slosh-mixes in a bottle of stuff that "makes" the gas Exxon, Shell, Hess, BP, whatever. When a supertanker crosses the ocean, it doesn't have a "Shell" crude compartment and a "Exxon" crude compartment, etc. It's all the same stuff, a commodity...even though Shell likes to run commercials saying their gas meets manufacturer standards blah blah blah. EVERYONE's gas does, because EVERYONE's gas comes from the same damn crude, gets refined at the same places, and distributed by the same companies.

This is similar kind of "inadequacy" based BS. High end digital cameras have large buffers in part because flash memory is so effing slow; a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots! Running a slow memory card in them won't harm them, damage them, etc etc. There are other factors to consider as well- my canon 10D has a 9 shot buffer for RAW shots, and some sort of in-between buffer for writing them to the card. I used to hit the end of the buffer all the time, because I never noticed that it wouldn't process the buffer while the shutter was held half-down in the focus position. Talk about a design flaw- but knowing that, I kept my finger off the shutter button whenever possible if the buffer had anything in it (displayed in the viewfinder) and the problem disappeared.

As someone who has shot with a semi-pro dSLR for more than two years, I can summarize that article in one sentence: "if you need to shoot images as fast as possible and have a camera with a limited buffer, buy the fastest card within reason, only if Rob Galbraith's tests show it'll make a substantial difference. Otherwise, buy a reasonably heard-of brand with a decent warranty in case it stops working." Why? Because just like with the gas, under the label you'll often find exactly the same thing- and only a very small number of people actually NEED the extra speed of a card that costs 50%+ more.

Oh, last piece of advice: don't buy huge memory cards. Three reasons: 1)you pay more per MB, usually. 2)You put all your eggs in one basket- if you drop a card and step on it, accidentally hit "erase all", or loose it... you get the idea. 3)"Photo tanks" with laptop hard drives offer MUCH cheaper $/GB storage. You could shoot 2,3,4,5GB/day in RAWs on a big vacation and still not fill the smallest of these widgets after a week. Buying one without a drive and putting in the old laptop drive you've got hanging around from an upgrade (provided it's not too power-hungry) is the way to go, as even 30-40GB is a BOATLOAD of space for digital photos.

Oh, and should you be on a trip- bring a few DVD-Rs, and burn the files to one or two if you really want to have the photos. Laptops get stolen/dropped/lost/seized/whatevered, and you can be absent minded / mistake-prone about transferring photos after a week of fun in the sun (aka rm -rf * type mistakes). Put one set in your suitcase, another set in your SO's/friend's/etc.

Re:you joke, but with the F1 car, yes.

[modecx]

There are other factors to consider as well- my canon 10D has a 9 shot buffer for RAW shots, and some sort of in-between buffer for writing them to the card. I used to hit the end of the buffer all the time, because I never noticed that it wouldn't process the buffer while the shutter was held half-down in the focus position. Talk about a design flaw- but knowing that, I kept my finger off the shutter button whenever possible if the buffer had anything in it (displayed in the viewfinder) and the problem disappeared.

Hrm... I've heard about that. I don't think that my 20D does this, but they may have fixed that in the 20D, or my setup causes it not to happen. You might try changing the auto focus button to the * button in the custom function menu, this way the auto focus is separate from the shutter button. The combo of exposure metering and auto focus might be too much for the camera to juggle. Anyway, I changed the location of the auto focus button a while ago and I find it to be much handier located on the * button.

For one, you don't have to worry about AF while you're focusing manually (you can use AF to ballpark and quickly adjust manually), and you don't have to worry about AF screwing your focus if you let up on the shutter accidentally. Secondly, I get fewer unintentional exposures from being excited or shooting from a bumpy ride. I also have it so that the big wheel is dedicated to changing the AF sensor location. I've found that I do much less fiddling and more getting good shots.

I totally agree with you on the other stuff, those photo tanks are especially nice. It doesn't take too long to fill up a 2GB card when shooting raw (2GB the largest card I use for the reasons you point out), so I find that keeping 3 cards in rotation till I can use the tank to download them is especially handy. Other than that, I think I'm gonna need a bigger disk or a RAID (yes, with backups) to keep all of my photos, as it seems that I don't like to delete anything at all since I don't have to worry about filling up a couple cards! So, the RAWs aren't bad (7MB), but TIFFs from raws for a 20D eat 24MB each! Ouch!

I do

[ballermann]

Well in fact I don't care for the transfer speed between camera and PC as well. But the card speed *is* a bottleneck on the camera. Not only does it restrict how fast you can take the next picture (important if you try to shoot a fast moving object) but it also dictates the speed of reviewing the pictures on the camera. Nothing is more annoying than waiting a few secondes between each picture when you want to browse back a few pics.

I bought one of those SanDisk Ultra Extreme cards and never regreted it. A friend of mine bought a cheaper card (probably only half the price) but recently ditched it for the low performance.

No Damage Done

[onetwentyone]

So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

If I spend a lot of money on a car, different fuel grades will probably do actual damage to the vehicle however, with a digital camera, the memory card isn't going to damage anything. Yes, my picture taking will probably be slower and the memory card might crap out sooner but that's ok as the camera itself is just fine. I can always go out and replace a cheap memory card.

Bookmark this page

[ColdWetDog]

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp

'cause it's slashdotted for the moment. The most complete CF / Camera database around (and not limited to 18 words on a page).

Maybe check back tommorrow....

Depends o what you're taking pictures of

[brunes69]

If you have an SLR and are taking pictures of moving objects, like planes or cars, you're going to be using the multiple capute modes to be taking 5-10 pictures with every button press, and snapping that button like mad as the object flys by.

If you're memory card can't keep up with the camera writing the data, you won't be able to take very many rapid-fire pictures before the buffer fills up. You could miss the best shot because of that.

Re:Depends o what you're taking pictures of

[Anonymous Coward]

...or toddlers.

I am a casual photographer, as are most people, and all I want is to snap whatever I'm seeing. Years ago I bought a (very) cheap camera, and I would have to take dozens of pictures that weren't completely blurry because of moving subjects. The delay between the button press and the image capture, and the time it took for the ccd to capture it, drove me crazy. My newer (still cheapish) camera is much better, but far from ideal.

If I ever get to the point where I lay out a lot of money for a good hobbyist camera, I'm going to be looking at capture speed and buffer size, not read/write.

well, SOMEONE has to be held accountable

[misanthrope101]

It would have to be Barry Bonds. Everyone else gets to plead "classified information" and "national security," which leaves him and Martha Stewart as the only possible criminals in the country, and Martha has already done her time. Plus he's, well, black.

Bad analogy

[davidwr]

The residue of burned gas stays in your engine forever.
If you use a functional-but-slow memory card it doesn't make any permanent changes to your camera.

Does it????

A better analogy:
You wouldn't build a suped-up gotta-access-it-fast file server and run everything off of a single, 1MB-cache, 5400 RPM ATA/100 drive would you?

Re:what ads?

[Tim Browse]

Pipe down, junior.

Re: hate to break it to you...

[Shanep]

Hate to break it to you, but DSLR's can't take full motion movies. Second of all, why are you downloading images tethered? Get a usb 2.0 card reader!

He said he got a firewire reader. BTW, I've never seen 480M/s USB2 outperform 400M/s firewire. All my firewire gear is WAY faster than my USB2 gear, including the devices which include both.

Testing has some major compromises?

[AaronLawrence]

They used USB2 readers. USB2 is 480Mbps - theoritical - or about 60MB/sec. Some of these cards are have more than 50MB/sec read/write, so it seems very likely the testing is being compromised by the actual USB2 speeds. There may be a much larger difference amongst cards than they found.

The other limitation I noticed is that they timed based on when the windows "copy" dialog appears and dissappears. But whats to say it won't continue writing for a while after that (from cache?)

Re:Testing has some major compromises?

[karnal]

In what I call the "real world" there is currently no flash card that is capable of more than 25MBytes/sec sustained. What card have you seen that has a 50MB/sec read/write speed? How much is it?

It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Even at 5 frames per second my Canon EOS 20D SLR cannot write faster than my memory card can accept even though I'm using a plain "slow" CompactFlash. There is no reason to buy "high speed" cards unless you have a lot of extra money making your wallet heavy. And, just to clarify, yes I would put regular in a Ferrari. Unless you have a high-compression ratio in your motor, regular gas will perform *exactly* as well as premium. It always amazes me how much the marketplace relies on ignorance for profit.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Bassman59]

And, just to clarify, yes I would put regular in a Ferrari. Unless you have a high-compression ratio in your motor, regular gas will perform *exactly* as well as premium. It always amazes me how much the marketplace relies on ignorance for profit.

While my Honda S2000 is no Ferrari (it's a convertible and an order of magnitude less expensive), Honda requires that you use at least 91 octane fuel. People who've put regular into it (in emergencies, like being in bumfuck nowhere and all that's available is regular no-lead) report that the car knocks like fuck and the loss of power is obvious.

If your car doesn't require premium, like our Corolla, then there's no advantage to using it. But cars that need it -- need it.

Re:It doesn't matter

[himurabattousai]

While my Honda S2000 is no Ferrari (it's a convertible and an order of magnitude less expensive), Honda requires that you use at least 91 octane fuel. People who've put regular into it (in emergencies, like being in bumfuck nowhere and all that's available is regular no-lead) report that the car knocks like fuck and the loss of power is obvious.

That's because your S2000 roadster (a great car, in my opinion) has an insanely high-compression engine. That 2000 stands for the engine size of 2000 cubic centimeters, or 2 liters. Getting gobs of horsepower out of that engine requires both super-high compression and super-high RPM, which is exactly the kind of situation that high-octane is needed for. In a Ferrari, neither the compression nor the engine speed are quite as high, meaning that regular octane gas may work just fine. I can't definitively say so because I don't know the exact specs for a typical Ferrari engine. What I do know is that they are much larger and have many more cylinders, two factors that reduce compression and engine speed.

Re:It doesn't matter

[AaronW]

I can easily exceed the rate of whatever memory I put in my Nikon D70s when I shoot pictures back to back. Then again, I often shoot in raw mode to allow me to perform better post processing of the images. Each image is 5-6MB in size, so at 3 pictures per second the flash will not keep up. The faster flash definitely makes a difference if I am shooting a lot of pictures, since the raw buffer is only 4 pictures.

Granted, the higher end cameras have larger buffers which helps mitigate the problem, but faster flash is definitely an advantage in these cases. Now with JPEG, it would be a different story, especially with normal compression.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I borrowed my friends S2000 for a few hours. The HP is there and it was pretty fun to drive but it felt like I was riding a crotch rocket. If you are under 6000 rpm, there is not much there. On flat roads it was fun but on long hills at decent speed, the low torque stood out. Its close range gearbox ratios can overcome the torque but you will be in a gear or two lower then I would like for general driving. Maybe if I drove it more or moved away to flatter country, I would get used to it.

The area I am refering to if anyone cares is I68 around Cumberland MD. If you've ever been in that area, you know the type of hills I am talking about.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Bassman59]

That's because your S2000 roadster (a great car, in my opinion) has an insanely high-compression engine. That 2000 stands for the engine size of 2000 cubic centimeters, or 2 liters.

Actually, starting with the 2004 models, the engine size has been bumped up to 2.2 litres, and the redline dropped from 9000 to 8000. The torque curve was smoothed out, too, for better low-end response. Yer right, though, high compression.

I suppose either one of us could google for Ferrari engine specs, but ...

Re:It doesn't matter

[Bassman59]

I borrowed my friends S2000 for a few hours. The HP is there and it was pretty fun to drive but it felt like I was riding a crotch rocket. If you are under 6000 rpm, there is not much there.

What's your friend's car's model year? As I noted above, in 2004 the engine was changed from 2.0l to 2.2l. The redline was dropped from 9k to 8k and the torque curve smoothed out, so it's better at lower RPMs. (That's my impression from also driving a 2003.)

On flat roads it was fun but on long hills at decent speed, the low torque stood out. Its close range gearbox ratios can overcome the torque but you will be in a gear or two lower then I would like for general driving. Maybe if I drove it more or moved away to flatter country, I would get used to it.

I'm in southern Arizona; not too many long hills here! I don't see what you mean by being in a gear or two LOWER than you'd like. I've noticed that the car likes to cruise at around 3k to 3500 rpm, which gives a decent amount of oomph if I step on the gas, but to really move (and this is true with basically ANY car), downshift a gear or two and it takes off. Really.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume it was a 2003? I drove it mid 2003. My comparison of the S2000 is too my own pushrod 5.0l Mustang. I know it is old design. On paper with some after market parts it has roughly 325HP/400torque and the torque at roughly 2000 rpm is probably in the 250-275 ft/lb range, in 5th gear with 2.73 rear end, 2000 rpm is 80 mph. I'm suggesting that number because a stock 5.0 hits peak torque around 2250 and my aftermarket upper and lower intake and cam peak about 1000 higher but still more then stock overall (less flat though). For the S2000, going from 60-80+ when going up a long hill required a downshift or two to get decent rate increase in speed compared to getting the same speed increase when on flat road. I know that is an obvious assumption but my Mustang has a much less noticable change when on the hills compared to flat. I can do a 60 to 80 (1500-2000rpm) without feeling the need to downshift.

I am not trying to compare the cars for overall performance at all and too each his own. The thing that stood out for me was the car acted a lot differently depending on the grade then I was used too. With the exception of some of the rotary engines [1], the S2000 has the highest redline going so that should be of course it will seem different. I could get used to it though, just a casual observation!

[1] many years ago I owned an RX7. HP proportional to RPM but overall, it lacked the numbers, the S2000 has the HP figures to make the higher RPM worth while.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Zakabog]

You either don't have a high speed card, or you have a slow card reader (or you have a high speed card and don't realize it.) I have a 256MB card from SanDisk, when I bought the 20D I figured I'd go for a 1 gig SanDisk Extreme III, fastest card available at the time, and I went with their new USB 2.0 card reader. The difference was huge, it took me 30 minutes to clear the 256MB card, with the 1 gig it was taking under 2 minutes. Also, with the 5fps the buffer fills real quick, especially when shooting raw, the buffer clears much faster with the Extreme III than the old SanDisk since the camera can write to the card much quicker. Now I have an EOS 5D and a 2 gig card and I'm so glad I don't have to wait a 30 seconds for the camera to write a 15 meg raw image to a slow card.

P.S. High performance cars suggest higher octanes because they're engineered to take advantage of them, Ferrari's recommend 91 and even my Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V (such a long title) asks for at least 89. So using regular gas in a Ferrari will almost guarantee engine failure down the line.

No SanDisk CF review?

[Experiment 626]

Really, how can you have a roundup of CF cards without any from SanDisk? They're only what, the biggest company in that market? And they just released a new line of CF cards that they're touting as "the world's fastest cards" so this would have been a good time to see how good the performance of their products really is. Maybe instead of picking four random CF cards, Trusted Reviews should have just stuck to the SD card side of things this review, and then they could have done a more comprehensive CF card review in a future article. That way, they could have hit people with twice as many ads.

Re:No SanDisk CF review?

[jani]

Rob Galbraith has a review of these new cards, but they're not on the market yet.

Also note that there isn't a DSLR on the market that can take full advantage of these cards, but SanDisk is launching new card readers that do.

Torture Test?!

[Anonymous Coward]

How interesting.. I've read about that already. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21/15 5238

Re:what ads?

[jlarocco]

I agree with the GP. People doing that are more annoying than the spam articles. It's spamming Firefox. Nobody ever posts "What ads? I'm using Opera's built in ad-blocker!" or "What ads? But I'm using privoxy!"

The only reason those posts aren't modded to -1 offtopic instantly is because it's Firefox. Pretty lame, since its ad-block plugin isn't even that good.

car analogies

[JeanBaptiste]

work about as well as a 1980 Pinto

Re: hate to break it to you...

[Telvin_3d]

That's because the USB is 480M/s burst speed where the firewire is 400M/s continuous. So, for short bursts the USB will beat the firewire, but any transfer longer than a few seconds and the firewire will always win out. That continuous speed is also why firewire is the standard in digital video editing. There is nothing worse than a jumpy input when you are scanning video.

Re:what ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a browser form of penis envy.

Even faster cards coming

[awd one]

Sandisk just announced their Extreme IV cards a couple days ago. They're going to be a little pricey for a while though... http://www.dpreview.com/news/0607/06071906sandiske xtremeiv.asp

Flawed

[philask]

Far be it from me to point out flaws in other peoples tests but these guys are using card readers which are simply slow. Getting 2.2 MB/sec write speed out of a Lexar Pro 133x CF card is pathetic, see more realistic results here (as well as tests on real cameras):

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0601/06011701lexar133 xcards.asp

Everyone already uses the Rob Galbraith tables!

[Strolls]

In the Photography Forums that I tend to read we get the "which CFcard is best" question several times a week and everyone always refers the poster to the tables from the Rob Galbraith test last year. They actually have a number of different pages, having tested cards with a number of different cameras, but that doesn't matter, nor does the fact that it's currently a little out of date - the salient fact is that for many of the expensive flash memory cards the bottleneck is the camera's write speed.

I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.

So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.

Stroller.

Re:Everyone already uses the Rob Galbraith tables!

[TubeSteak]

I peeked at that and ended up with two questions:

1. Why do most of those cameras write JPG faster than RAW to the CF card?

2. What makes a CF card faster than some other card?
I.E. Is it the quality of the memory, the controller chip or a combination of the two?

Re:Everyone already uses the Rob Galbraith tables!

[Strolls]

Why do most of those cameras write JPG faster than RAW to the CF card?

Ummm.... I hadn't really paid so much attention to that aspect of the tests, but I'm reading it the other way around, as RAW being faster than JPEG.

EG: on the EOS 350/XT table the SanDisk Extreme III 1GB writes Large Fine JPEG at 4.888MB/sec, whereas RAW .CR2 is written at 6.263MB/sec.

I would believe this to be because of the necessity of jpeg conversion - the RAW file is "raw" data straight from the camera's sensor, wrapped up in some simple headers & binary-formatting, whereas it takes some slightly complex encoding to produce a jpeg (admittedly from a dedicated processor within the camera).

What makes a CF card faster than some other card?
I.E. Is it the quality of the memory, the controller chip or a combination of the two?

Um... good question, but I have no idea.

Stroller.

Re:Everyone already uses the Rob Galbraith tables!

[Anonymous Coward]

the Rob Galbraith site is just as ad ridden, in fact moreso than the "trusted reviews" 19page site.
My Adblock is currently blocking 16 out of a possible 38 items on the page, so nearly 50 percent of the elements on the page are adverts and there are 17 pages on the Rob site

in comparison the trusted reviews site is having 3 out of 20 elements blocked which is 15% of the page content

so both are just as advert ridden and both are just as spammy, i guess people are more obsessed with making money from advertising than actually providing people with a useful resource from the goodness of their hearts (like the old web/bbs culture)

another comparison site

[tarm]

Another (and I think better) comparison site is here and it has also compares different cameras in conjuction with different cards, which is fantastic if you have one of those cameras. Even if you don't, you can tell whether the card is fast.

What about readers?

[Xofer D]

What I would like to see is a roundup of card readers - I have seen enormous differences in speed between different USB 2.0 card readers, and I haven't seen any comprehensive reviews for them.

Define "Expensive"

[edunbar93]

So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

Well, I suppose that all depends on how you define an expensive camera.

$300, while expensive, is not expensive for a camera. Kind of like how $3000 is not expensive for a car.

Expensive cameras generally start at around $900. That's around where professional SLR digital cameras *start*, and go up from there. And believe me, anyone who spends $2000+ on a camera, doesn't fuck around with buying cheap cards. That's in no small part because they need very *large* memory cards to store pictures in RAW format.

"Most of us" don't spend that much money on a camera. Most of us spend around $300-$500. And thus, since we generally don't have a lot of money left over to spend, it's spent on cheap memory cards. Not that it's a big deal these days, since today's cheap memory cards are last week's hella fast and large memory cards. I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30. And I'm told I could have gotten it at 1/3 that cost elsewhere. Our Canon A80 has a 1x write 256M CF card from 2 years ago, and it was considerably more expensive than that.

Re:Define "Expensive"

[WuphonsReach]

I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30.

The going rate for 1GB SD cards seems to be around $24, including shipping. The 2GB SD cards are $44ish. Those are prices from places like NewEgg. So I'm not sure I'd believe that you can get a 1GB SD card for $10 (at least, not a name brand).

(I have a Canon Powershot SD550 because I have a Toshiba Tecra laptop that has an SD card slot.)

Regular in the US

[way2trivial]

is not "ALWAYS" 87 go into the mountains of like, wyoming.. it's 85 or 83

4 GB SD works fine

[scatter_gather]

From page 2 of the article:

As an example, the Canon EOS-1D Mark II (or for that matter any EOS-1D series camera) is not compatible with SD memory cards larger than 2GB (as of January 2006). Whether this will or can be addressed in a future firmware update is difficult to say but for the meantime, we would suggest you check with your camera manufacturer before you purchase a 4GB SD card or higher. CF cards up to 8GB work without problems in the Canon EOS-1D Mark II, but due to the scarcity of these cards at the time of this review, weve focused on 4GB CF cards.

Not quite. My Canon EOS-1D Mark II has the current firmware, which is from October 2005. I bought a pqi 4GB SD card Hi-Speed 150 card and lo, the camera would not format the thing. Before I took it back to the store I popped it into the PC and formatted it there. Put it back in the camera and it has been working fine ever since. Perhaps they should have picked a different example.

Is this serious?

[Pope Raymond Lama]

From the article:
"The stopwatch was started upon clicking the paste option"
Eeekkk. I knew bad software used to spoil people...but pasting with the mouse and time measure with a stop watch in an otherwisde serious benchmark has got off limits.

Please help!! Someone bring computing back to personal computers!

PS. for those clueless mouse clickers out there, all that would be needed to have the computer itself measure times, in an Operational System, would be typing:
time cp files /media/mycard/myfolder

Er, lock the mirror, not the sensor

[swillden]

So a video mode would have to lock the sensor up out of the way

I meant mirror, not sensor, in case that wasn't obvious.

More on testing SD flash memory

[kg261]

There are a lot of different aspects to testing nand flash performance. The burst speed of a 25MHz 4-bit bus (used in original SD) would be about 12.5Mbytes/sec. But data is not written immediately to flash, but stored in a buffer. An often quoted read/write speed of 9Mbyte/sec likely involves writes to consecutively addressed blocks and the SD memory block management system has a ready supply of erased blocks. Put a filesystem on top of the NAND memory block management system, and things get more complex. Fragmentation is going to be a problem here eventually as well. Did this test do any long term testing? Another factor (for PC testing) is the SD interface. Is this over USB or and SD slot such as those found in a laptop. The peak rate may be 60Mbyte/sec, but add protocol overhead, and again, random access times can be heavily affected. I went through this a little while ago and wrote a test program which measures peak USB flash memory performance 'under' the filesystem to as to try to attain the quoted peak speeds. I have write and read results for plain blue Sandisk (5 and 8 MByte/sec) and Lexar (5 and 4 MByte/sec) at http://s3u.sf.net/

US & UK Gallon

[Frankie70]

My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor [wikipedia.org] that did 35+ mpg, ffs.


A UK Gallon & a US Gallon are different.

A UK Gallon is 1.2 * US Gallon.

You are getting 35 MPG(UK) is the same as 29 MPG(US).

Still the Morris minor seems more efficient :-)

Re:US & UK Gallon

[Anonymous Coward]

A UK gallon being larger makes the MPG larger not smaller when converted to the US MPG.
So 35 Imperial gallons = 42.0332646 US gallons. Maybe you should work on your algebra a bit ;-)

Re:US & UK Gallon

[Galvatron]

What the fuck is the matter with you? MPG means "Miles Per Gallon," or Miles/Gallons. If the size of the gallons decreases, the numerator gets bigger, leading to a lower number. Example: if a car goes, say, 1,050 miles on a full tank of gas, and that tank has a capacity of 35 Imperial gallons, or 42 US gallons, then the car would get 1,050 / 35 = 30 MPG (UK), or 1,050 / 42 = 25 MPG (US). The same car would be rated at a higher MPG in the UK versus the US.

Re:US & UK Gallon

[denzo]

A UK gallon being larger makes the MPG larger not smaller when converted to the US MPG. So 35 Imperial gallons = 42.0332646 US gallons. Maybe you should work on your algebra a bit ;-)

If the UK gallon is, as you say, bigger than the US gallon, then explain to me why 35 gal (imperial) < 42 gal (US)? ;)

Re:US & UK Gallon

[Anonymous Coward]

Think before you post

Think before you post

Think before you post

Or at least make your sarcasm more obvious

1.0 imp = 1.2 us

multiply each side by 35

Re:US & UK Gallon

[identity0]

Jesus Christ, what a clusterfuck of conversions.

All the conversions seem to have confused people about what the original posters were saying... You guys are converting backwards. You should be doing a US to UK conversion.

allusionist: posts data about his car, in US gallons
Tim Browse: Calculates MPG correctly, but assumes data and output is in UK gallons - "Holy shit, you get only 25mpg(UK)?"

Tim did get the correct result for US MPG, but assumes it is in UK MPG. The conversion thus has to be from the US MPG to UK MPG in order to compare with Tim's old car's 35mpg(UK). In actuality, the allusionist gets 25mpg(US), which would be about 30mpg(UK).

Or you could convert Tim's old car's 35mpg(UK) to US MPG, which would be about 29mpg(US)

Re:US & UK Gallon

[Zaatxe]

Is it a bad moment to propose the metric system?

Regular vs. Premium

[dubner]

> "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it?

If the compression ratio and timing of the Ferarri's engine was suitable for 87 octane gasoline, yes I would. Octane higher than needed doesn't translate into more power, easier starting, "cleaner" burning, etc.

Similarly for memory. If the memory meets the required specs, good enough.

And "good enough" is what I strive for. (Not "perfect", not "better", not "premium".)

Advantage 0f 500 MB

[wbean]

Good advice in the parent. Also, if you are on a trip and your laptop has a CD burner, not a DVD burner, then it's a lot better to have 500 Mb cards than 1 or 2 gigs. The problem with the large cards is that their contents won't fit on a single CD.

Here's a litle secret for ya

[/dev/trash]

Octane is NOT a mesaure of gas quality. Premium is not any better than the "Plus".

Pentax Optio S4i

[wbean]

I noticed a big improvement when I switched to fast cards on my Pentax Optio S4i. I've also found that transfering images through the camera's USB connection is both slow and eats up the camera's memory.

The math works out

[TubeSteak]

If it took 10 minutes to transfer about 100MB, something else is indeed wrong

100MB in 10 minutes actually works out fairly closely to reality.

USB 1.0 has two modes:
Full Speed - 12Mbits/s
Low Speed - 1.5Mbits/s

1.5Mb ~ 187 KB
100MB/600sec ~ 167 KB/s

If he was using Windows XP, the various service packs &/or patches fscked up his USB settings. I'm pretty sure it's a known problem with WinXP's SP/patches, but I can't be bothered to look it up.

Alternatively, the camera only supports Low Speed Mode.

Re:The math works out

[Tim C]

So what you're saying is, there was something else wrong :)

Re:The math works out

[Anonymous Coward]

If he was using Windows XP, the various service packs &/or patches fscked up his USB settings. I'm pretty sure it's a known problem with WinXP's SP/patches,

The original comment says it was a "new iMac" and didn't mention anything about running Boot Camp/WinXP. Therefore, OS X probably fscked up the USB settings.

New Mac vs. PC commercial:

• Hi, I'm a PC.
• Iiiiiiiii'mmmmmmmm aaaaaaaaaaa Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaac.

Bad Analogy

[8ball629]

Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

Thats just a bad analogy, of course you're not going to put regular gas in a Ferrari - that could impose physical problems where a cheap memory card will NOT do the same thing in an expensive digital camera. That is unless the card is homemade or something.

What about CF used in Single-Board computers?

[karl.auerbach]

I use CF with a pair of ext-3 filesystems on the PC-Engines WRAP boards, consequently this article was useless for me.

And using Windows via a USB based reader/writer, and timing it with a stopwatch - sheesh, how much noise do they want to introduce into their measurements.

They could have eliminated the USB factor by using a PCMCIA based adaptor.

Re:What about CF used in Single-Board computers?

[The Famous Druid]

Yes, they could have got better times avoiding the USB adapter, but as they sad in the review, they weren't after 'ideal conditions' figures (manufacturers already provide these), they wanted to measure performance for a 'typical user'.

D70 pedantry

[caveat]

a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots!

Just to be a nitpicky SOB, my D70s shows 9 shots remaining for Large/Fine JPEGS, 19 Large/Basic...Small/Basic there's 49. Moot point though, with the 80x write-accelerated CF card the shooting speed barely drops once it starts writing out. Worth every penny.

Speed is ok

[iminplaya]

I even tried it once or twice. However, I didn't see anything about durability. How many writes will I get before the thing pops a cork?

No ObSimpson?

[Tim Browse]

My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!

Sheesh, you go away for hours and come back, and nobody has done the Abe gag yet. :-)

Rookie mistake, guys.

Basic difference...

[Vo0k]

With faster card you might get ever-so-slightly higher performance of the camera. It's like you get maybe 3% increase in performance for double the price of the card. If you're so pro that the 3% matters to you, and you earn enough that double the price is still negligible, it's fine.

With better gasoline for Ferrari the size of your penis doesn't increase even by 0.1%. And no bullshit about being able to get to work faster, or better safety due to increased driving dynamics please!

Re:Basic difference...

[daverabbitz]

But High-Octane gas does have a higher flash-temperature and burns slower, which reduces knock, which in turn reduces cam, valve and bearing wear, which means that that $150K isn't going to require a $40K engine rebuild because a valve fractured and destroyed the cylinder lining of that purty V12.

Re:Basic difference...

[Vo0k]

Except there's completely no use for a $150k car on any roads in any country. It goes into illegal speeding at maybe 20% its power, driving it at 50% available power is in most cases a suicide, and the whole purpose of the remaining power is the promise to increase your penis length by 0mm. Adding superb fuel prevents your penis enlargement tool from expensive repairs and allows for another few horsepower with solemn purpose to increase your penis size by another 0mm.

And if you keep arguing that it makes any sense to buy such a car in the first place, you have a really tiny weiner.

May be interesting to a Professional Photographer.

[Anonymous Coward]

This MAY be interesting to a Professional Photograper............

But to anyone else it's meaningless!

Who really cares if one card takes a little longer?? Can I hold more pics if it does?? Will it result in less failures of cards? Personnally I've never had a failure in either a CF or SD.

Is this article REALLY worthy of /.??

If it is, is /. really worthy of my continued readership or has it just become a BS platform?

CF cards with preinstalled GIMP?

[tepples]

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

Then put some color correction software on a card and sell it :-)

No Sandisk Extreme III's in the review?

[EricTheO]

When I got my Canon S2-IS I looked for the best SD memory and got the SanDisk Extreme III SD 1GB card. I know it's not widely available yet(I got mine online), but you would think this test would have the Extreme III 2GB card in it's lineup. http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(1973)-SDSDX3- 2048-SanDisk_Extreme_III_SD_2GB.aspx

Torture test? But what about reliability?!

[swordgeek]

Some torture test this was. Speed is the only thing measured in the article, without any attempt at measuring how these things might break under questionable conditions. Nor was there any discussion of how effective the warranty support was.

My wife had a Lexar "Jumpdrive Secure." The thing would never properly close out of Windows to be removed, and was generally a bit finicky. One day it decided to lose eleven of her students' final exams (which would normally be backed up on the college's system, but was down for maintenance that day). A call to Lexar led to several hours of support work and finally a diagnosis of "well, you're screwed." Thanks Lexar. Won't make that mistake again.

I realise that CF and SD cards aren't identical, but the technology is similar, and Lexar has lost any chance of me buying their products.

Re:May be interesting to a Professional Photograph

[Albert Sandberg]

... but you wouldn't buy a ferrari neither... so this IS for those that matters about speed....

Make sure to buy the non-compression card

[PowerKe]

A few months ago I was on vacation in Tenerife. At some point a shopkeeper walks up to me and tells me he wants to show me a trick with my camera. So I follow the guy into the shop where he makes two pictures of me with my camera, one with and one without a flash. Then he hooks it up to the TV to show me te pictures. Both pictures were in general way too dark and the one with the flash overexposed in the foreground.

He tells me he's going to swap out my 'cheap' CF card with a 'special' one. After swapping the cards he takes another picture and just like magic the picture is almost perfect. He explains that that's because my 'cheap' card card uses compression. So while my camera is capable of shooting 3.3MP, the card is only storing 1.6MP while his 'special' one will store all 3.3MP. Well, seeing the results it all sounded like a plausible story and I'm pretty sure he had already conviced some customers to buy new CF cards.

The reason why the 'cheap' card looked so bad and the 'special' one had such good quality? Turn contrast up and brightness down on the television when showing the 'cheap' pictures and press reset while switching the CF cards. Both 'cheap' pictures looked fine on the camera's LCD.

Stupid question

[JumperCable]

"So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?" -Article Promo

It's because the camera manufactures don't give you any more guidance on the speed of the memory you are looking for beyound "Buy Ours at 10 times the price!"

It took me half a day of searching to find the right throughput to expect from my camera & how that corresponded to memory card speeds. I was then able to buy a better card at the right price. Heck, not even all memory cards advertise their read/write speeds.

Note to Moderators

[slightlyspacey]

For the humor-impaired, the inclusion of the characters ":)" in the above posting is known as an emoticon or, as known more precisely in the industry, as a "smiley". It is also associated with an attempt, just an attempt mind you, at humour. For a complete list of emoticons please refer to the definitive article at Wikipedia. I'm sure that this tidbit of information will go a long way towards more meaningful and accurate moderation :-|

A better analogy would be

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing a digital camera with any memory card with a El Camino, whereas a Film SLR for $200 and film for roughly $10 and get photos would be like a Lamborghini. 35MM Film is equivalent of a 20 megapixel camera. You can use it up to a poster size photo with little loss of quality, whereas a prosumer 10 megapixel would still suck at even 8x10. Even at 30MP, a digital camera wouldn't have the detail that a film camera would have, the effective MP rating would only be 1/4 of the advertised rating.

Watch, this will get modded as troll since it shows the truth rather than some digital "fanboyz' distortion of the facts.

California has you beat!

[Atario]

It helps if your state is long.

Pissing contest here: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=41.998 316,-124.208239&daddr=32.728727,-114.618022&ie=UTF 8&om=1

I'm sure Alaska would have us both beat, but there are too few roads to actually do it.