investigtion of the performance of different CF cards in 1Ds MkIII

Gaffer

Gaffer

Gaffer

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I have four different types of CF card. I have been doing a little experiment to see what difference the card make to the performance of the camera.

I used Audacity to record the sound of the shutter and took measurements from the soundwave trace afterwards. I'm shooting raw, without noise reduction.

With all cards, I got a similar pattern:

- 10 or 11 frames at exactly 5 fps.
- A pause
- 2 more frames
- A pause
- 2 more frames
- A pause
- 2 more frames
- etc...

The first pause was short.
The second and subsequent pauses were longer but all the same length

The result were not always consistant. Sometimes a burst of 10, sometimes a burst of 11. Most of the subsequent pauses were the same but occasionaly there would be an irregular, longer pause. I report below the most consistant results:

Sandisk Ultra II:
first pause: 2.9 Seconds
subsequent pauses: 5.9 seconds

Sandisk Extreme III:
first pause: 1.7 Seconds
subsequent pauses: 3.1 seconds

Sandisk Extreme IV:
first pause: 1.8 Seconds
subsequent pauses: 1.9 seconds

I also have an own-brand card from a dealer near Euston:
first pause: 2.2 Seconds
subsequent pauses: 4.2 seconds

So, the speed of the card does make a difference, but of course, only after you have filled the buffer. Clearly the 1DsMkIII can take advantage of the improved speed of the Extreme IV. It's a shame the that the only one I've got is only 2Gb. At 25MB ech, it only takes around 80 frames...

Andrew
 
Gaffer said:
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Interesting test, I always wondered what the results would be but could never be bothered to check them on my MkIII, i've been unable to find any similar tests on the internet demonstrating the difference without going off on a 10 page document and sending me to sleep.
I use ExtremeIII's I also have an ExtremeIV but I don't often shoot to buffer lockout so I don't really notice the difference, but then again at 20MP+ I imagine you get to buffer lockout a bit quicker than me ;)

How are you getting on with 1Ds? I've heard its like shooting Velvia/Kodachrome.
 
I did a similar thing with a 1Ds II a while back, I used a different method though, I set the camera to manual focus and manual exposure setting, and continuous shooting. I held the shutter down and started timing, then released the shutter once the buffer was full and stopped timing once the memory card access LED went off. I had the exposure set to the fastest setting and the aperture at the smallest to produce consistently black pictures of roughly the same size

I found that there was a slight speed advantage when using extreme IV's compared to other sandisk cards however, the main difference in speed occurred due to the amount of data on the card, eg an 8GB card which is empty in my test finished writing *a lot* faster than on and 8GB card with 7GB of photos on it.

All this testing was done for a company I was working for last summer so I don't have any precise values to hand unfortunately, but it might be something you want to consider with your testing as I would be very surprised if it was just happening on the camera we had. from what I remember there was a difference of around 15-20 seconds in the tests with an empty card and one with 7GB of data, so it wasn't just a small difference due to human error when starting/stopping the timer.
 
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