Shooting RAW with the D300 I can easily justify the need for an 8GB Compact Flash card. But do I need an Ultra DMA card that writes 40MB/sec (theoretically).

- I very rarely need to shoot at 6 frames/sec (or 8 frames/sec)
- What is most important is the time to copy files from the card back to the hard drive on my PC. From what I've read you need a high-speed CF reader to match the speed of the UDMA card

The UDMA card is twice the price of the standard card. Anybody think of a good justification?

Try looking on this site, they test cards in camera's to find out what the speed difference really is.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

Roger

The D300 is one of the first cameras to support UDMA speeds, so you will see improvements in write speed, minor improvements in loading of images when scrolling through image review, and so on.

You do need an UDMA compatible reader to take full advantage of this, but they are blindingly fast. I was able to dump the shots from 3 UDMA cards last night (14-bit RAW + JPEG from D3 and D300) in a very short period of time... and this was a day where I shot several hundred frames on either camera.

When I'm on assignment, instead of taking a while to download my shots, I can have the whole lot in the computer in under 20 seconds. Gets me right to what I'm looking to do- get through all the shots quickly.

If you don't shoot a lot of action or bursts, and don't plan on being in a time-crunch situation, I'd say it might not be worth the cost... but if you want the better pairings with the D300 and faster downloads, UDMA is your best bet.

The trouble with writing reviews and stuff on this site is that it's best if you know what you're talking about. For that you need some real experience. I already have the Transcend 4GB 120x card. The 8GB 266x card and the 120x variety is about the price of a night in a hotel on the coast but I just had to give up a days holiday next week to go to yet another crisis meeting so who cares?