CF Card Sizes?

I'm planning the purchase of a D70 (as soon as someone will sell me one) and would like to know everyone's opinions of the optimal CF card configuration.

I'm looking at the possible file sizes (guessing from D100 specs) and they look huge. I probably want to shoot RAW so I can get the best sharpness and adjust whiteballance at home. It looks like 9.5 mb NEF and 4.5 mb compressed NEF. Does anyone shoot in the compressed NEF mode? Will I notice the speed disadvantage with buffering and the limitations of my strobe? Is there a quality difference?

If I assume I can get 100 compressed NEF files on a single 512 mb cf card, what is optimal. Some thoughts.

1) I'd like to be able to do a two-tank dive trip without opening the housing. I've found that the less crap I have to manage on the boat the better. It's much easier to make sure I seal everything up right in my hotel room, then to do it while getting sea sick on a crowded boat. My elf didn't have the battery capacity for this.

2) If I get two or more 512 that may be a kind of insurance against flooding. Also I can keep all my topside family photos seperate and safe.

3) If I get one big card 1GB or bigger, I can continue to delete photos in the room post dive and still have the maximum room available for future dives. (e.g. after two days of diving with 2 512 mb cards, deleting 1/2 of the photos leaves me with 2 256 mb cards--maybe not enough for another 2-dive trip. With a 1GB card, I still have 512 mb available).

4) Is there a real advantage to high end cards like SAndisk Ultra or Lexar pro series? What are you using?

Thanks

Look at the file sizes for COMPRESSED NEF as that's what the D70 will take. It will not record uncompressed format.

So that will help you get more on your card. I recommend a 1 gig card for this camera. That should give you enough storage to meet the battery life.

Ideally, you want to be able to shoot w/o opening the housing until your battery is mostly drained right?

HTH

James

more is better and too much is just enough!

Two 1GB cards and a image tank will make life very easy.

Thanks for the link.

I've seen this review before but (unlike everything else on Phil Askley's excellent page) it needs to be updated badly. Its at least two years old and does not compare some of the newer high preformance cards--including the Lexar 40 x and the Sandisk Ultra II. With Lexar's announcement of 80 x cards comming soon, the comparison of standard to 12x "high preformance" cards isn't really relevant anymore. I haven't seen any more up to date info either.

With respect to the data presented there it seems like the RIDATA and Trancend cards would be a good deal. They are rather hard to find though. Has anyone had any experience withy either of these?

I'm currently thinking about getting two 1 GB Lexar 40 x cards. I've seen these on CNET from a veriety of reputable distributers for around <$240 each which makes them <$200 after the current $40 rebate. That's better than even the cheap 1GB basic sandisk cards, and you get boosted performance with some recovery software.

I've thought a bit about the trade between high performance vs. cost and decided that high performance won't buy me anything. If my strobes (DS125 even) can't match the buffer rate of my camera then card speed won't matter. Whatever I shoot will go into the buffer and be written whenever it wants. My primary concern is how many RAW shots can I store on my vacation without getting a secondary storage device.

What do you think?

I too have been looking at cards recently and found Rob Galbraith CF Database to be useful and more up to date then the other resources I have found. At least with the higher end DSLRs' Sandisk pretty much rules the top spots with their Ultra and Extreme cards. Lexar is much more hit and miss as far as speed goes.

Then again do we really need the fastest cards available for UWP? Mostly not, but when you encouter the big creatures and are shooting available light, I would hate to miss a once in a lifetime shot because I had to wait while my CF card is being written to. If you look at the money you have invested into your gear: housing, camera, strobes, etc. why start skimping on memory? Though you made an excellent point in that you can only shoot so fast underwater and if you really don't need to take full advantage of your cameras processing power and want to save some money then go for less expensive card. If you really think you don't need the speed then you might look at micro drives, inexpensive and large capacity.

One last thing, why is Lexar offering $40 rebates and Sandisk is not? Because Lexar makes a better product or are they trying to capture more market share? Or maybe they are just being generous?

my two cents, Keith

Here is a link to Rob Galbraith's CF Database:

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

First of all, after using the S2 for 4 dive trips, I would not consider going without my laptop. It is an integral part of the whole digital photography experience for me. The question is how much memory do you need to last between downloading intervals. I have gotten by, on a live-aboard, with a 512 but ran into difficulty doing two boat dives in Coz with the same. I could and should have changed cards between dives since this had always been the norm with film and I don't see it as any more of a challenge with digital. I am now using 1 GB cards and this probably will not be an issue.

As far as speed, I don't think it matters as much while shooting with underwater strobes. It has been established that the faster cards are much faster when using the 32 bit cardbus adapter and after last week on the Cayman Aggressor, I can verify that.

I agree with Scotty; the write speed of the card is not usually the limiting factor.

My approach is simple; get the biggest card you can.

FWIW,shooting Canon DSLR in RAW 1 gig didn't prove to be nearly as much as I thought it would be. I'm looking at a Hitachi 4gig microdrive at present (not as waterproof as CF but the price is right).

Whether or not a given card is big enough is largely a matter of personal shooting style. Shooting RAW on the D60 with a 512 MB card I get around 70 shots, and I rarely fill the card on a given dive. Part of it is because I don't bracket as much as I should, but part of it is that I find myself being more selective about shots, not just rushing around shooting everything. That's not to say that everything I shoot is worth shooting, rather I think about what I'm shooting a little more.

If I were buying CF cards for a 6MP camera today, I'd probably get (2) 1Gb CF cards, and I'd be set. I'd definitely stay away from having a single very large card, i.e. a 4Gb Microdrive, simply because if that's the only larger capacity card you have and it fails, you're stuck.

Good point Tom, it makes sense to have a back up even if you went with a huge main card and could not afford a second large capacity backup. I would get a 512 or 1 gig backup card depending on my budget. It would be very dissapointing to say the least to be on boat trip and have a card fail without a backup. My personal prefrence would be to have a main card large enough to shoot through at least 3 dives. This is not a must, but I dislike taking my housing apart after every dive.

Keith

I dislike taking my housing apart after every dive

As do I. I had the pleasure of opening my housing on a boat in Cozumel a couple weeks back. It was a large boat, but the only dry storage area had no light. I had to choose between trying to work in the dark or risking getting water in the housing. I ended up covering myself and the housing with a couple towels and working like I was in an old view camera. Quite a sight, and not something I want to repeat any time soon.

I have lost two batches to date on microdrives, so I stay away from them unless I absolutely have to use them. But sometimes they are necessary on extended shoots without a notebook (hence, my $199 4GB microdrive, ripped out of the Creative Muvo 2).

I use the Lexar 2GB with the 1Ds, which unfortunately hasn't fallen in price yet (still around $600).

1GB cards are way too small for the 1Ds -- something like 80-90 raw files per gig, and even fewer when shooting simultaneous jpg. I rarely shoot 80 shots per dive, but you never know when you'll need to.

Eric, when you say you lost two batches on microdrives, what exactly happened? Could you recover the data at all?

The microdrive showed up as empty upon insertion into to my computer's PC card reader.

Both times, I used PhotoRescue and retrieved some small percentage of the images. Most were corrupted (partially retrieved).

That's scary! Did you ever determine what the problem was and how to stop this from happening again? Were you able to review the images on your camera at the time or did it come as a complete surprise only oce you tried to read the microdrive on your PC? Was this a problem of one particular rogue microdrive or can this happen with any microdrive?

Apologies for all the questions but as I now also have the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive I would hate to find out one day that all my data has been lost after a hard day's diving! It has been working flawlessly with my 10D so far, but I haven't had it underwater yet....

My 1 gig microdrive is currently a 70MB microdrive, and is not looking like working properly any time soon. I've been shooting lately with smaller CF cards. Despite my bad microdrive experience so far, I'm willing to give the 4 Gig hitachi a go. $600 for 2 gig CF vs $200 for 4 gig microdrive - on that basis microdrives are almost disposable! I'm planning longer term on going all solid state, in a year or two when 4 gig CF cards are affordable. Til then, I'm just going to try and be nice to my microdrive.

BTW, my Lexar CF card survived a trip through the washing machine and still works fine. I have a feeling a microdrive wouldn't appreciate this treatment.

I dislike taking my housing apart after every dive.

While I dislike opening the housing when diving off smaller boats, I usually can't wait to get the images onto my laptop while on a live-aboard, after every dive. The cool thing about a housed camera is that when you open the housing after drying it off, there is still a relatively sealed camera inside. Unlike when exposing the guts of a Nikonos V to change rolls, a few little droplets, if wiped off immediately, are not going to destoy anything.