Are we stuck with SDHC cards?

[jerryrock]

On Canon's consumer 1080p camcorders and the T1i/T2i all you need for sustained 1080p video is a Class 6 SDHC card.

For the 7D, I see the Canon manual recommends a CF card capable of 8MB/s or better. I don't think you need a $300 90MB/s card.

For the 7D Canon recommends UDMA compatible compact flash cards the slowest (UDMA 0) transfers at a rate of 16.7mb/sec)

DPreview.com tested the camera with the Sandisk Extreme Pro 32 gig CF card

"At eight frames per second the EOS 7D is the quickest APS-C DSLR that we've seen in our labs so far. The frame rate is impressive on itself and even more so considering that with a very fast card, such as the Sandisk Extreme Pro, in JPEG format the 7D can maintain this speed indefinitely (well, we gave up after approximately 60 sec or 320 frames) and for 24 frames when shooting RAW. Surprisingly that's even better than the official Canon specification (126 frames in JPEG, 15 frames in RAW)."

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos7d/page13.asp

 

[cube]

Your statement is just incorrect. The Sandisk Extreme Pro card has a maximum write speed of 90mb/sec or 600X.

133x is the maximum speed of the $80 card I was talking about, that is 20 MB/s.

 

[cube]

For the 7D Canon recommends UDMA compatible compact flash cards the slowest (UDMA 0) transfers at a rate of 16.7mb/sec)

That must be for shooting stills. For video, the comments for the $80 Kingston 133x are good with the 5D and 7D at amazon.com

 

[jerryrock]

That must be for shooting stills. For video, the comments for the $80 Kingston 133x are good with the 5D and 7D at amazon.com

I would recommend you not give much credence to comments from general sites like Amazon. You will get more reliable information from professional photography sites.

Granted any CF card will work in the 7D, but why would anyone buy the fastest shooting APS-C camera only to cripple it with a slow writing CF card?

This is a matter of buying the right tool for the job. The recording media is a critical element of the photographic process. With the best camera in the world you finally take that career making image, but if your card fails, you fail.

 

[cube]

I would recommend you not give much credence to comments from general sites like Amazon. You will get more reliable information from professional photography sites.

Granted any CF card will work in the 7D, but why would anyone buy the fastest shooting APS-C camera only to cripple it with a slow writing CF card?

This is a matter of buying the right tool for the job. The recording media is a critical element of the photographic process. With the best camera in the world you finally take that career making image, but if your card fails, you fail.

In the amazon.com comments they say precisely that this card is not for RAW.

 

[Chris7]

Interesting debate here. I had wrongly assumed photographers would more uniformly prefer CF, as the burst rates and megapixels seems to be just going up, and I think the top CF cards can write about 3x's faster than the top SDHC's (30MB/sec vs. 90MB/sec).

With the 7D, for example, the 90MB/sec (600x) cards seem to be just almost enough shooting 18 MP bursts at 8 per sec (link provided by osin on another thread). But on this camera at least, I don’t know who would want to wait the 20-30 seconds for the RAM buffer to clear between bursts on a 30 MB/sec card (the current max for SDHC, I think).

Anyway, it’s a little relieving that the people think companies will continue to invest in SDHC (and now SDXC), since that appears to be what I am stuck with unless I go prosumer. Perhaps the SDHC/SDXC will eventually catch up with CF (I'm much more interested in speed than capacity here).

 

[mtbdudex]

Tihs just released medium format DSLR uses SD/SDHC cards:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/1003/10031002pentax645d.asp

Pentax unveils 40MP 645D medium format DSLR ($9.4k USD)

Dual SD/SDHC memory card slots
The PENTAX 645D has a pair of memory card slots for the recording of images on both SD and SDHC memory cards. This dual-slot design gives the photographer extra data-storage options: for instance, recorded images can be assigned to different cards according to recording format (such as RAW or JPEG), or one of the cards can be used as the backup of the other. The settings for each memory card slot can be easily made by dedicated button.

 

[jerryrock]

Tihs just released medium format DSLR uses SD/SDHC cards:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/1003/10031002pentax645d.asp

Again it's about shooting speed. Medium format cameras are not well suited for action photography and SD cards suit them fine. The new Pentax shoots at a maximum rate of 1.1 frames/sec.

 

[Ruahrc]

With the 7D, for example, the 90MB/sec (600x) cards seem to be just almost enough shooting 18 MP bursts at 8 per sec (link provided by osin on another thread). But on this camera at least, I don’t know who would want to wait the 20-30 seconds for the RAM buffer to clear between bursts on a 30 MB/sec card (the current max for SDHC, I think).

I don't shoot action or sports, but from what I understand- the better you got at it, the less "spray and pray" you tended to do. Therefore a few frames of quick bursts at 8fps right around the max action would be called upon, but intelligent timing ultimately is more effective compared to holding it down and hoping at 8fps.

 

[VirtualRain]

What would make a lot of sense is for pro camera's to adopt dual SD card slots (like the Pentax) but allow users to configure them for speed (striped as in RAID0) or redundancy (mirrored as in RAID1).

You could get 60MB/s theoretical throughput with a pair of SDHC cards in striped mode. Not bad.

BTW, 8fps at 25MB per RAW file is 200MB/s. No card is going to keep up with that rate although obviously the faster the card the quicker it will clear the buffer. Given Canon's specs that the 7D can shoot at max rate up to a limit of 15 RAW files I'm guessing from this that the 7D has about 512MB of RAM.

 

[harcosparky]

Before I buy, I'd want a second opinion: Is this a permanent shift from CF to SDHD for consumer DSLR's (until the next format card comes out), or does anyone suspect Canon or Nikon will start using CF again?

I'll stick with CF cameras myself - Canons 7D fits the bill very well.

I looked at the T2i and when I saw it was not CF, I decided against it.

Then I saw a review of the 7D in use down in Antartica covered with snow and ice and it never complained. That reviewer did say the climate killed lesser cameras within hours.

The shift to SD cards is due to form factor, the design gurus think " smaller is better ".

Canon still uses CF in their high end cameras - not so on the lower end.

 

[VirtualRain]

I'll stick with CF cameras myself - Canons 7D fits the bill very well.

I looked at the T2i and when I saw it was not CF, I decided against it.

Then I saw a review of the 7D in use down in Antartica covered with snow and ice and it never complained. That reviewer did say the climate killed lesser cameras within hours.

The shift to SD cards is due to form factor, the design gurus think " smaller is better ".

Canon still uses CF in their high end cameras - not so on the lower end.

CF is great if you have an existing investment in CF cards. However, it's an added inhibitor to someone moving up from the Rebel line to the higher-end Cameras. Canon would be wise to make the 7D Mk2 and/or 60D accept either a CF or SC card to ease the upgrade path.

 

[Patriks7]

Before I buy, I'd want a second opinion: Is this a permanent shift from CF to SDHD for consumer DSLR's (until the next format card comes out), or does anyone suspect Canon or Nikon will start using CF again?

The Rebel line is for sure going to stay SDHC. Some reasons for that: size, they have been SDHC for some time now and the targeted consumers most likely already have SDHC cards in some product at home, but I doubt they have CF cards.
I'm kind of thinking that the higher end model (xxD) might go SDHC soon, because until recently it was more of a "pro" model, but with the 7D it isn't as much as it was before, thus Canon can make it more consumer oriented with switching to SDHC, but it wouldn't really make much sense, as the cameras have enough space for CF cards.

 

[sushi]

Personally, I don't care which format they choose - just so long as everything uses the same!

Agree here.

It's nice to be able to use the same memory cards in multiple devices.

Does it really matter?

Ten years from now is a long time in technology.

Who knows what we'll be using then or what the capacities will be.

 

[harcosparky]

CF is great if you have an existing investment in CF cards. However, it's an added inhibitor to someone moving up from the Rebel line to the higher-end Cameras. Canon would be wise to make the 7D Mk2 and/or 60D accept either a CF or SC card to ease the upgrade path.

Some times you have to bite the bullet.

Flash cards are relatively cheap compared to lenses.

I remember back in 1987/88 buying one of the first Canon EOS cameras to come out, it was the EOS 650. Talk about a tough upgrade path, all of the lenses I had been using on my F1 bodies were useless as they would not work on the EOS system. Some manufacturers tried to give backwards compatibility between their AF and non-AF lines but Canon said 'new system, new lenses'.

Interestingly enough in all of my experiences with digital cameras I never had a camera that was not CF. I remember a sales person 5-6 years ago telling me CF was dead, that even then nobody was using it. He probably said that because he had no cameras that used CF.

I think the SD/SDHC and other small cards came about as manufacturers wanted to shrink the digital camera, to the point where they looked like matchboxes and not a camera. CF cards are larger and require more room.

There is a twist with CF cards as well. Many of my CF cards will do me a disservice in my new Canon EOS 7D, so here I am shopping for some newer faster CF cards.

I bought the 7D to play around with the HD video aspects, I could have gotten the T1i or the new T2i, but then I would have had to invest in SDHC cards that would have been useable in only that one camera.

If I buy a new CF card for the 7D it will work in my 10D , and 40D with no problem. It will even work in my old Olympus E-20 which has CF and Smart Media Card slots.

 

[VirtualRain]

Although I predicted the demise of CF long ago, I still believe it's a storage format without a future.

CF uses a much more complex and archaic parallel ATA bus architecture. This adds expense to the cards and camera's storage controller and pin interface. It's also limited in it's performance. CF cards have maxed out. Even hard drives moved on from this interface about 3-4 years ago for many of these reasons.

SDHC uses a modern serial bus, not unlike every other storage or interconnect used today such as SATA, USB, Firewire, etc. The speeds on serial bus architectures tends to double with every generation of device as signaling quality improves.

Also, just because pro camera's are big, doesn't mean that manufacturers want to dedicate all that internal volume to a CF slot.

As I've indicated before, surely Canon want's pro-sumers to move up the line and invest in more expensive camera's. So they know full well that they need to make it as easy as possible, and not force everyone to invest in a new storage format. Thus support for SD will need to creep up the line.

The 1D Mark IV's addition of an SDHC slot is a foreshadowing of things to come for every pro camera revision, and likely a transition to SD exclusively over the next couple generations.

Time will tell, but I think the future of storage in pro camera's lies in dual SD card slots as I've suggested in the past that can either be configured for speed or redundancy.

 

[Chris7]

Just bought a Sandisk 30MB/sec 16GB SDHC card for the Rebel X2i I plan to buy. For twenty percent more I could have gotten a Sandisk 60MB/sec 16GB CF card.

It was an unusual experience -- I actually felt buyer's remorse during the purchase.

 

[toxic]

The 1D Mark IV's addition of an SDHC slot is a foreshadowing of things to come for every pro camera revision, and likely a transition to SD exclusively over the next couple generations.

huh? no it's not. 1-series cameras have had dual CF/SD slots for awhile now. SDHC is just the next step for SD, like UDMA cards for CF.

 

[VirtualRain]

huh? no it's not. 1-series cameras have had dual CF/SD slots for awhile now. SDHC is just the next step for SD, like UDMA cards for CF.

My bad... didn't realize that. I still think there are good reasons for camera manufacturers to transition to SDHC across the line.

 

[Patriks7]

Ten years from now is a long time in technology.

Who knows what we'll be using then or what the capacities will be.

Don't forget, we have to survive 2012 first!