Tuesday 11 November 2008

Kent Wedding Photographer - UDMA cards


In anticipation of the imminent arrival of my Canon EOS 5D Mark II (I'm in an optimistic mood today!) I've just purchased four 8Gb SanDisk Extreme 'Ducati Edition' compact flash cards. These have a transfer rate of 45Mb/s, using the ultra direct memory access (UDMA) protocol which the 5D Mark II supports. This allows fourteen 21.1 megapixel RAWs, at 3.9 frames per second, to be shot in a single burst.

You don't want to be waiting for your camera to catch-up when you're shooting a wedding.

Check out my photography here: wedding photographer in Kent

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

David are you a secret motocycle racing fan? :)

This card is actually no different to the Sandisk Extreme IV - which is also a little cheaper and a better option for video on the 5DMk2 as it comes in sizes greater than 8GB.

David said...

Hi,

I bought it in spite of the fact that it has a motorbike on the card! ;-)

The Ducati card has a transfer rate of 45 Mb/second and can be purchased for £71.99. The Extreme IV card is 40 Mb/second and costs £69.99. I was happy to pay the extra £2 for this slight gain!

I would never use a card larger than this. I'd rather have 4 cards with 150 shots on each one, than one card with 600 shots on. Risk management!

Yours,

David

Anonymous said...

You can see some real-world card result on this link. The Ducati is not the best performing card, but you might prefer it in terms of reliability.

http://www.hjreggel.de/cardspeed/

This shows the Transcend 300x UDMA card hitting 51.34MB/s read and 49.7MB.s write (Ducati is 43MB). I've not checked but I guess the Transcend card is probably cheaper.

The video support requires 8Mb/s so you probably get away with lower spec cards of higher capacity (16GB = 30min).

David said...

Absolutely George - reliability comes first.

I've never heard of Transcend memory cards - are they reliable? SanDisk CF cards have never let me down and so I'll stick with them until they do.

For those braver than I the comparison is:

A SanDisk Ducati 8Gb (293x, 298x read, write) costs £72.

A Transcend 8Gb (309x, 249x) costs £50.

The price difference, from my perspective, is totally irrelevant.

I bought these cards without even considering video use. They're just to ensure I don't have to wait for the camera to catch up when shooting RAW.

Yours,

David