SD cards: Extreme III or Ultra II?

[colorado]

When does one justify needing the Extreme III over the Ultra II? Not sure which I should get. I'm wanting to do sports photography (mountain biking), and am wondering how much the Extreme III will benefit me? Thanks for any advice. Sean.

[deckcadet]

Well, basically it comes down to write times. If you're doing a lot of action shooting in continuous mode, and keep filling up your camera's write buffer (causing a slowdown in the shooting speed) an Extreme III will theoretically write faster. Some cameras do better than others with the same cards though. Some may not be able to clear the buffer fast enough. Some have very small buffers.

What camera do you have?

JMHO, but I feel most of the cameras using SD exclusively as a memory format aren't usually the best for sports photography due to their miniscule buffers, so a high speed card will help clear that faster, but you're still losing speed- The Pentax *istDL2 shoots at 2.8fps but only has a 5 JPEG/3 RAW buffer, the DS2 only improves that to 8. The Nikon D50 has a 2.2fps speed, with a 12JPEG/4 RAW buffer.

[SmartWombat]

When does one justify needing the Extreme III over the Ultra II?

Rarely, and randomly

Check here http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...e.asp?cid=6007 for a really useful list of speed of card vs camera make and model.

Usually there's a difference of less than 10% between those cards, and if you're unlucky your camera won't benefit from the card speed anyway.

If you're using a P&S it's less likely to matter than if you use a DSLR.

[colorado]

I'm happy to hear there isn't much difference between the two. That's a great article SmartWombat, but it didn't have any info on Pentax, Olympus, or any of the other cameras beside Nikon and Canon. Canon and Nikon are giants, casting a shadow over the rest. It provided enough info to see that the extreme isn't so extreme though. Thanks for advice! Sean.

[SmartWombat]

Right, the only other one they've added is the Fuji S3 Pro.
I found with my Minolta A1 and A2 P&S there was very little difference in speed with different cards. Still took 15 seconds per image, or a whole LAP to empty the buffer.
They didn't support WA so buying the fastest cards didn't help.