Which Mem card to improve High speed shooting issue

[G-Dubs]

I have a canon 60D and having recently taken it to cad west found that I have an issue wih my high speed shooting

frames/second should be 5.3/second, which I do acheive, however I only get 5 frames at this rate, as indicated by the display in the bottom right of the VF and as experienced when shooting. After that it pauses for what seems like an age and then drops to low speed shooting speed

I think it's caused by the memory card which is a panasonic SDHC 8GB cat 4.

Is this the cause of the issue?
what card should I get to remedy (value for money please)
if not the problem, what is

all advice appreciated

 

[G-Dubs]

So good to know it's a mem card issue. I thought my camera was borked.

will any cat 10 do the job?

 

[G-Dubs]

Ok well I am now the proud owner of a Sandisk Extreme pro SDHC 16GB (95MB/s.

bad news is that the "max burst counter" on the lower right side of my viewfinder remains resolutely at 5. In practice just banging of a few frames in high speed it slows down after after about 9 frames,after which it slows right down, which is pretty crap as it's not really any better than before

Am I missing something here????

 

[G-Dubs]

Hi If only this was just caused by RAW shooting. the problem i'm describing happenswithjpeg andthe performance stays thesame even if I shoot in lower res. Strangely it also doesn't get any worse if I shoot RAW.

to further depress me Itried my wifes 500D and although it's frame rat is a fraction slower it keeps that rate up till the cows come home, long after mine has slowed to a plod

Is this acamera fault

any other 60D folk out there????

 

[G-Dubs]

Before, you had:

- 5 frames, followed by lockout for ages.

now you get:

- 9 frames follows by a slowdown.

I'd kill for that sort of improvement.

The fact that the slowdown doesn't immediately the buffer is filled after 5 frames is wonderful.

With the slow card, you reach the end of the buffer, then have to wait till the *first* image has been written to the card before the camera can take another picture.

With the faster card, by the time you have reached the end of the 5-frame capacity of the buffer, you have already written maybe 3 of the images to disk, so you can immediately take three more and write them the buffer at burst speed. By the time you've taken those three, you have written another image to the card and can take the 9th image immediately. Only at this point do you saturate the buffer and have to wait for the card, so now the camera is limited directly by the card speed and the whole system slows down to the speed of the card.

Andrew

Many thanks, your explanation has really helped me understand what's going on here.

What do you require such high speed shooting for anyway if I may ask? You won't notice much of a difference if you are primarily limited by your cameras buffer compared to the speed of the card it writes to. Use a Normal or Basic JPEG setting and you'll definitely see that amount of files rise on burst mode. My D3 can take a very similar amount of RAW and fine jpeg shots in a row before hitting the buffer, however a normal Jpeg or basic one can nearly shoot indefinitely (well 130 shots in a row before the camera stops, due to that being the max for one run in the settings!)

You pay for what you get though. If you really need the speed and the burst, buy a model that actually supports such things properly.

I'm geting into aviation photography, and having spent some days on CAD west found that I was hitting the buffer wall about half way through my PAN which meant I had to start the pan later, which in turn meant I had to chose between incoming/head on shots and side on shots as there was not enough frames on high speed for both. i'm hoping the extra 4-5 frames i'm now going to get will be enough.

 

[G-Dubs]

Many thanks for the great and friendly advice guys.

Exactly the reason I posted here and not some of the other photo sites.

Summer beckons (although the near vertical trudge up the hill side does not) So Mrs Dubs and i will be hooking up the caravan and heading for Wales.