Slashdot Mirror
Is It Worth Paying Extra For Fast SD Cards?
Barence writes "Are faster grades of SD memory card worth the extra cash? PC Pro has conducted in-depth speed tests on different grades of SD card to find out if they're worth the premium. In camera tests, two top-end SD cards outshone the rest by far, while class 4 cards dawdled for more than a second between shots. However, with the buffer on modern DSLRs able to handle 20 full-res shots or more, it's unlikely an expensive card will make any difference to anyone other than professionals shooting bursts of fast-action shots. What about for expanding tablet or laptop memory? A regular class 4 or 6 card that's capable of recording HD video will also be fast enough to play it back on a tablet. The only advantage of a faster card for media is that syncing with your PC will be quicker. However, a faster card is recommended if you're using it to supplement the memory of an Ultrabook or MacBook Air."
As an avid amateur photographer I once tried lower-end, slower SD cards. The wait between shots of ~1 second (disregarding the camera buffer) means you cannot even preview your shots during that time. Instead you get to wait with a nice blinking LED on the back of the camera until the preview is ready. I found this nearly unbearable after only a dozen or so shots and when I got a chance I immediately spent the money on a faster card that allows previews basically immediately. NOTE: I am using a D800, so your mileage may vary on this... with 36mp RAW files I was waiting several seconds to just preview a shot.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
"However, with the buffer on modern DSLRs able to handle 20 full-res shots or more, it's unlikely an expensive card will make any difference to anyone other than professionals shooting bursts of fast-action shots"
UHm, no. Top of the line SLR can't handle 20 shots in buffer, and any consumer grade is 1-2 max. You won't get you 3-5 FPS (mid tier) or 5-9FPS (high end) without a fast card. And don't even think about recording 1080p or 720p@60 without a class10 UHS1 type card. The whole PC PRo exercise is a useless article apparently trying to convince consumers to buy slower things because 640k is enough for anyo....oh wait we've heard this before, haven't we :). I'd love to see them record HD video on Class4 card. Not happening.
Buying a class 4 or 6 card is just stupid these days. That is the PC equivalent of actively seeking out a USB1.1 portable HDD instead of USB3. Because USb 1.1 is all the speed you'll ever need really.
You will never regret buying class 10, but you will almost certainly regret a class 6 so why bother? Heck, in a year or two there won't be any class 6 available anyway - it is too slow...
Cameras: Canon EOS550d, S90.
There's no point buying a Class 10 card if your camera's write speed is no faster than Class 6. Unfortunately, though, some camera makers don't provide this information, or they make make it hard to find the write speed. Thus you may have to do some web research for your specific camera.
That being said, you'll never complain (after you have bought the card) if your card is faster than your camera.
As a side comment, I think it's better to have 2 16gb cards than a single 32gb card, purely from the perspective of "no single point of failure." My goal on vacation/shoots is to have at least one card unused at the end of the trip. (I learned the hard way what can go wrong when I ran out of cards, erased a card I thought was copied to my computer, and then discovered the backup program saw the erased card and said, "Oh, you didn't want that data after all!" No one to blame but myself for that operator headspace error.)
It's very odd to me that they seem to have left out Lexar completely from this little test. Back when I was really into digital photography I spent a lot of time on DPReview and Amazon and B&H Photo looking for the best deals on the fastest CompactFlash and SD cards. The top competitors seemed to always be the SanDisk Ultra/Extreme lines and Lexar's Professional cards. Kingston has usually done well also, but the most prominent/popular over the years have always have seemed to be SanDisk and Lexar.
Even 2-3 years ago I remember Lexar having "300x" cards competing with the SanDisk Extreme lineup. Just now doing a quick search on Amazon shows Lexar "600x" SD cards available, so it's not like they've dropped out of the market.
Maybe somebody at Lexar pissed off the editor of PC Pro? I can't imagine why else you'd leave one of the fastest cards on the market out of a speed test. Hmm...
Oh, yeah. PC Pro. Why the f**k am I even reading Slashdot anymore?
While modern DSLR cameras might have large buffers, normal consumer-grade or even enthusiast-grade point-and-shoot cameras don't necessarily have them. IMO it makes sense for an average person to buy a higher speed card. They're probably only buying one card anyway, and the price difference between a slow card and a fast card is small enough to make it worth it.
Meritline - oh, great, another site for me to order cheap toys I don't need but can't resist. Thanks a lot!
I once went to frys to pick up some extra cards, and the sales rep told me that if I buy the more expensive cards, it will improve the quality of my pictures because they will be sharper and more colorful. I am still trying to figure out how he justifies that statement.
The class ratings from reputable vendors tend to be reliable, but you don't always get this from lesser known manufacturers. Most Class 10 cards get at least Class 6 performance.
A Class 10 32 GB SDHC card costs $33 or less. The same card at Class 6 costs $25 or less, a whopping $8 in savings. Most people buy one card and leave it in their camera except to transfer photos to the PC to upload to Facbook, etc. Is it really advisable to recommend that people save $8 for a one-time purchase of a memory card? I think not!!
For Photography, work out your budget, figure out what you need for your style of taking pictures, and buy the best memory you can afford for your needs. If you can get by with class 4 or class 6 memory, great. If you find that you need class 10, try out some of the budget options noted above and see if they serve your needs.
For other uses, you may very well find that a slower card actually works better for you than a 'faster' card. Class 10 is great for streaming large volumes of data onto the card, but experience has shown in the microsd cards that if you need to do a lot of small file manipulations, read and write, etc. a class 4 may outperform a class 10 card. This is of interest to people doing cyanogen mod implementations running off of the sdcard, but is a completely different use case from a photographer shooting high res photos, or a videographer shooting HD video.
You never know...
I've learned through trial and error what cards actually work on my camcorder. For still photography, I've always been a SanDisk fan. But every class 10 SanDisk SD card I have used is unable to support the highest quality recording on my Canon camcorder. Oddly, class 10 Transend cards work fine. It appears the class 10 rating is a read-speed rating - not write-speed. I've tried 6 different SanDisk cards over the years and they continue to disappoint.
Place nail here >+
I used to have an old 7" netbook for my daughter to use (I've updated her since).
Ah pubescence 2.0, them were the days.
It will when you record highres video
From the article (first page, you should have spotted it)
It may seem counter-intuitive that capturing still images requires a faster card than shooting video, but Full HD footage isn’t as space-hungry as you might imagine. Despite the “high-definition” terminology, each HD frame has a comparatively low resolution of just over two megapixels. Plus, since consecutive frames of a video are often extremely similar, clever compression techniques can be used to store moving images efficiently. A data rate of 4-6MB/sec is ample for continuous shooting.
Still photographs have a far higher resolution: a typical consumer DSLR may capture around 12 megapixels of detail, and high-end models often record more than 20 megapixels. Each scene may therefore contain ten times as much information as a comparable video frame
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I always buy Class 6 SD cards, why because there slightly cheaper then Class 10 nearly always a smiler or identical card when from the same brand. Do I sound illogical? Study the specification, Class 10 has a less rigorous testing metric, they don't do any random access tests on Class 10 cards. So far I've had the best performance with Sanddisk Ultra class 6 cards. I admit I do push the random access on some of my uses, like using it has the system drive for a Nook Color, booting UBCD4win on a ISOSTICK. and as a system drive for a couple ARM Developer boards.
Since SD cards are the standard storage medium for the Raspberry Pi, what about a speed comparison for that?