D300 slow continuous

Auraomega · 5 Sep 2011 at 12:49

I have a D300 and a Sandisk Ultra 30mb/s and the card is definitely genuine, however I'm getting only about 2-3fps from it. Remove the card and the camera can rack off 8 shots in demo mode. Surely the card shouldn't be limiting, especially seeing as the photos should be held in the buffer before they're written to the card? Is there something I'm missing here?

bigredshark · 5 Sep 2011 at 13:07

Dump your settings to a compactflash card and then reset the camera to defaults to see if that helps? If it does it's something setting related, if it doesn't it's probably the card. Genuine or not, dodgy cards aren't unheard of. Easy enough to test with another card...

BruceLee · 5 Sep 2011 at 13:12

Check you don't have it set to 14-bit NEFs etc, slows down the camera a fair bit, also compression types.

neil_g · 5 Sep 2011 at 13:35

does the D300 have a quiet shutter mode? thatll slow things down too.

Auraomega · 5 Sep 2011 at 14:21

Set to 14bit I get incredibly slow speeds, back to 12bit and it's at ~8fps

Does it make much difference to be shooting in 12bit? Most monitors are only 6bit and the majority of IPS monitors are still 8bit... I guess I'll keep the camera set to 14bit for normal and 12bit for when speed is a must.

juno_first · 5 Sep 2011 at 15:30

Also check if long exposure noise reduction is turned on as that increases the shooting time as it takes a black exposure after every shot with the same settings in order to reduce noise.

Jimbu · 5 Sep 2011 at 15:40

Auraomega said:
Set to 14bit I get incredibly slow speeds, back to 12bit and it's at ~8fps

Does it make much difference to be shooting in 12bit? Most monitors are only 6bit and the majority of IPS monitors are still 8bit... I guess I'll keep the camera set to 14bit for normal and 12bit for when speed is a must.

There is actually little benefit of shooting 14bit over 12bit, and that benefit isn't even visible.

Auraomega · 5 Sep 2011 at 16:59

I always turn off noise reduction settings.

I did a bit of reading not long after I made that post (I figured I should do some hard work rather than relying on you guys

) and it seems the only advantage is when horribly underexposing images, which realistically I shouldn't ever do! I might switch back to 14bit when taking something like a sunset just to 'future-proof' it, but otherwise 12bit is what I'll be using.

D.P. · 6 Sep 2011 at 18:22

Auraomega said:
Set to 14bit I get incredibly slow speeds, back to 12bit and it's at ~8fps

Does it make much difference to be shooting in 12bit? Most monitors are only 6bit and the majority of IPS monitors are still 8bit... I guess I'll keep the camera set to 14bit for normal and 12bit for when speed is a must.

14bit does make a very very small difference, so for low speed shooting like landscape work then best to keep it at 14 but uncompressed. For sports shooting, then use 12 bit.