600D buffer full - faster cards?

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ajf

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I was doing some shots at Prescott today with my 600D and several times had to stop as I had filled the buffer and wait for the data to write.

The camera specs are 3.7fps for 6 RAW.
The cards are 16Gb Sandisk Extreme 45MB/s

Would faster cards make any difference in these circumstances or do I just accept that is the limit of the camera?
 
Well I definitely noticed the difference between a basic class 10 card and my Sandisk Extreme Pro which is 95Mbit/s but whether you'd notice a big diff going from 45Mbit/s I'm not sure! This was on my old 650d btw
 
I notice the difference between the Extreme and Extreme Pro using my 7D when burst shooting in RAW. That's obviously a camera which already has a high buffer and burst rate.
 
Lexar Professional 16GB Class 10 UHS-1 600X 90MB/s High Speed SDHC Memory Card , these are THE fastest cards price to speed ratio
 
avatar12m said:
Lexar Professional 16GB Class 10 UHS-1 600X 90MB/s High Speed SDHC Memory Card , these are THE fastest cards price to speed ratio
Click to expand...

Ignoring the fact that the Lexar card is actually 90Mb/s and not 90MB/s :P The Sandisk is 95Mb/s but... If you can find one of these then I guess that would be the fastest lol

http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/16/toshiba-exceria-pro-sd-cards/

Shame they don't seem to be on sale yet! Toshiba also seem to do a 95Mb/s card though.

I tried looking for a test where they were all benchmarked but couldn't be bothered to spend more than 5 minutes looking and I didn't find one :P
 
Thanks :)
Looks like I'll be getting a couple of faster cards!
Are Amazon a fairly safe bet for avoiding fakes - assuming they are not an Amazon 3rd party seller?
 
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I'd try one faster card before investing in a pair. Even with a 90MB/s card my 550D was pretty poor and fell short of the quoted spec.

I shoot JPEG when shooting motorsport, just get the exposure right and you won't have to worry about loss of detail.
 
ajf said:
Thanks :)
Looks like I'll be getting a couple of faster cards!
Are Amazon a fairly safe bet for avoiding fakes - assuming they are not an Amazon 3rd party seller?
Click to expand...

Yes, Amazon even have versions produced for them which are in easy to open packaging.
 
I'd be very careful buying faster more expensive cards to cure this problem as they almost certainly won't. The chances are your camera will not be able to take advantage of anything near to the full speed and even if it can the increase in performance will be nothing like having a bigger buffer, your frame rate will still drop like a stone when it's full. If you want higher FPS you need a better body it's one of the ways canon artificially restricts lower end models to encourage you to upgrade.
 
Can't see the faster card making any difference as the 600d can't write to the newer fast cards at there quoted speed, also most cards only get near there quoted write speeds in a card reader


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OK, thanks for those additional comments.
I did wonder about the speed thing regards writing to the card. It seems silly to keep increasing the speed of teh cards if most tech can't take advantage!

One extra card won't hurt though so might just get one anyway to see what, if any, difference it makes.
Cheaper than a new body too!
Trying to save for a 70D at the moment so maybe next year.....
I've found he AF isn't the greatest either for motorsport.
 
found this on DPreview
"
Shorthand wrote:

I believe that the T3i maxes out at the speed of a Class 6 card. Anything above that is OK but not able to be used by the camera.

Fortunately, that statement is not valid per my conversation with Canon tech support today. The T3i is able to take advantage of cards rated for speeds up to 45MB/s which should be at least 2x faster than the fastest Class 10 cards and about 4.5x faster than a Class 10 card operating at minimum spec of 10MB/s. It should also be between 7-8x faster than a Class 6 card performing at the specified minimum 6MB/s speed. The manual may state Class 6 as the minimum speed for reliable HD video capture, but that it is most definitely not the fastest card supported by the camera."

so looks like going over 45mb/s is wasted
 
i did some research on this when i was looking at the 7d, unless its for a job or something i dont think its worth it
i got a 25£ 45MB/s
 
The article that convinced me to try a newer and faster card was this:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/380167/does-your-camera-need-a-fast-sd-card/3

Page 3 of it shows the effect a faster SD card can have for you. It won't make your standard FPS any faster obvious but what it will do it lessen the chances of filling the buffer as they clear quicker and if you ever need to simply hold the shutter button down, you'll see in the results that faster cards make a difference there.

Whether your camera is able to make use of that extra speed is the question and the only real option seems to be to try one out which is what I did. Like all computery stuff, I tend to buy the best I can afford at the time so personally would go with 90+ Mb/s cards. At least then if you ever upgrade your camera then you'll have a decent card to use with it :)
 
ajf said:
OK, thanks for those additional comments.
I did wonder about the speed thing regards writing to the card. It seems silly to keep increasing the speed of teh cards if most tech can't take advantage!

One extra card won't hurt though so might just get one anyway to see what, if any, difference it makes.
Cheaper than a new body too!
Trying to save for a 70D at the moment so maybe next year.....
I've found he AF isn't the greatest either for motorsport.
Click to expand...

You can shoot jpeg to help things :) Maybe you'll lose out on a bit of image quality but you won't be so buffer limited so your hit rate will increase...
 
Think I missed that this was a 600D, thought it was a 60D.

As Janesy says though, shooting JPEG is the real way to getting the speed performance. Its obviously what most professional sports shooters will be using, especially editorial ones who need to get the shot and get it out to picture editors as quickly as possible.

To be honest, when I shoot sports, I sometimes wonder whether shooting RAW was actually worth it given how many photos you end up with and have to sort through.
 
Phal said:
Ignoring the fact that the Lexar card is actually 90Mb/s and not 90MB/s :P The Sandisk is 95Mb/s but... If you can find one of these then I guess that would be the fastest lol
Click to expand...

Eh? All these cards are rated in MB (i.e. Megabytes) per second rather than Mb (Megabits) per second.

95Mb/s would be useless. It's only about 12MB/s which is half the size of a RAW file from a modern DSLR so it'd take two seconds to store each file.
 
So some question really whether a faster card will make any difference.
Didn't find that article on DPReview when I looked but wonder whether I had seen something elsewhere to that effect as I bought the 45MB/S cards!

Perhaps I'll just give jpeg a go next time and see how I go. Just got used to the flexibility that RAW gives for exposure 'issues'!
 
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