dslr.ws

The Digital Photography Now website has tested the performance of a high-speed UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) CompactFlash card (the Lexar Pro 300x UDMA) in digital SLR cameras and compared it to the speed you get with a regular (but still fast) card (for their test, the Sandisk Extreme III).

Their surprising conclusion is… wait for it… a UDMA CompactFlash card in a UDMA-capable camera is faster for RAW shooting. I know, you’re shocked.

There were some less expected results, however. For example, they found that the Canon 40D (which does not claim to be UDMA-capable) gave barely faster results with a non-UDMA card, at least when shooting JPEG-only. And when shooting JPEG-only in UDMA camera and with a UDMA card, there was no improvement over a non-UDMA card, since the bottleneck is in the camera’s processing chip where it does the JPEG compression and other image processing, rather than in the transfer to the memory card.

As far as speedups go, the Olympus E-3 had a 66% speed increase with the UDMA card when shooting RAW, and the Sony Alpha A700 had a 266% increase in the same conditions. Note, however, that the A700 gave a much slower shooting speed with the non-UDMA card than the E-3 (0.6 fps versus 1.9 fps), so while the percentage increase was much greater, the E-3 is still a faster camera (2.2 fps for the A700 versus 2.7 fps for the E-3 in burst mode with a UDMA, shooting in RAW.)

Interestingly enough, the test results also show a slightly faster read speed from the non-UDMA Sandisk card when using a USB card reader (16.9 MB/s for the UDMA Lexar card versus 17.4 MB/s for the non-UDMA Sandisk card.)

Their final conclusion, not surprisingly, is “if you shoot RAW and your camera does support UDMA, you probably will benefit from using UDMA cards.”

Be sure to check out the full article for all the numbers and tables that make up their full test results.

Kingston announced that their Ultimate line of CF cards will now to 266x, twice as fast as was previously available in their CF Ultimate cards. They also mention that they’re including some free software called MediaRECOVER that’s “a recovery tool to help restore lost, deleted or corrupted image files.” Sounds nifty.

The Kingston Ultimate line is available in 2, 4, and 8 GB capacities, and all the pricing in their press release is in British Pounds, so who knows how much they cost in real money. Ha, just kidding!

That 266x appears to translate to a rated speed of 45MB/sec reading and 40MB/sec writing to the card. They also state that the cards have an auto-sleep mode to preserve battery life, which isn’t something I’ve ever heard of in a memory card before. But who knows, maybe that’s something common that I just never realized they do. Anyone know?