40X, 80X, does it make a difference?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ryguyinlj

how does the writing speed of compact flash cards effect the performance of a camera? I have a digital rebel and right now I am using a card that is 26X and I am wondering what kind of a difference a 80X card would make? Will it allow me to shoot more continuous shots? Will it allow the camera to buffer faster after shooting?

It depends on the camera. For the most part, the "bottleneck", if there were one, would be caused by the camera.

Check out this link:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...?cid=6007-6425

You're camera isn't known to be incredibly fast or incredibly slow. It's kind of in the middle. To give you an example of how much difference a camera makes the Canon 300D can write 1.325MB/sec to a Lexar Media 1GB 80X card. The Canon 1Ds MKII on the other hand scored 3.753MB/sec using the same testing methodology. That's almost 3 times faster!

Check the table of cards for the 300D to see the kind of difference they make (or don't make). Just translate the numbers into ratio's. And yes, all operations that read and write to the card would be affected by the speed of the card. The lesson here is that the speed of the card doesn't necessarily carry over to all camera models. It could score top of the list on one camera and perform poorly in another.

Good luck :)