oldtool2 Loc: South Jersey

I wrote the following to Canon support. It will be interesting to see their responce. I will post it here when I receive a responce.

I own a 7D and have upgraded the firmware to 2.0. My question is about write speed from the buffer to a CF memory card. I would like to know the write speed for the 7D and 50D camera also. I presently am using Sandisk Extreme CF cards with a read/write speed of 60mb/sec. Will either of these cameras exceed the speeds of these cards? If so how fast are they?

I am referring to photos only, do not use either camera for video.

Jim D

Festina Lente Loc: Florida & Missouri

A good question for Canon tech support. I look forward to seeing the response you get.

dasloaf

love your question!

oldtool2 Loc: South Jersey

I got this from a Canon tech this morning.

"The write speed for this class of camera is 133 mbs. If you do not use the camera for video it will not make much of a difference for you. The buffer will dump faster to the card when ever you use continuous shooting."

While, 133mb/sec! Never dreamed they would be writing that fast. Just for the heck of it I fired off photos till the camera slowed down. It shot 26 photos before pausing. This is with the new firmware 2.0 This is 3.25 seconds of continuous shooting, not bad!

Basically what he is telling me is there really is not much of an advantage to going to a faster card for shooting photos. Because of the price difference in the Extreme and the Extreme Pro I think I will stay with what I have.

Jim D

Festina Lente Loc: Florida & Missouri

Thanks for sharing this!!

I'm not so sure that is what he was trying to say. The whole response seems a tad tyro to me. But if the 133MB/sec speed for the 7D buffer memory is true, then any card slower than that would probably limit the amount of time you can shoot in burst mode before the rate slows down and pauses.

With firmware 2.0 more memory has been allocated in the buffer, so this is an improvement.

Even in sports photography, single bursts longer that 3 seconds are more the exception than the rule, so getting a card faster than 90MB/sec is probably something that most of us will rarely ever take advantage of for still images.

The rep also left you dangling with regards to the merits of a faster card for video... even though that was not your question, it begged another.

Good information, but it takes some reading between the lines.