Funny Numbers

I took delivery of a D70 last night which is my first DSLR from previously using film (F80) and a 4040 before that.

In playing with camera - its hard to say what I like or don't like as I really have noting to compare it to - but I noticed that:

I am using a 1GB lexar Compactflash card

Camera is set to NEF which means approx 5MB file size

Camera says approximately 100 shots available

100 x 5MB - 1GB = 500MB : I seem to have lost 500MB

Is this right or have I missed something?

Cheers

Paul

The D70 shoots compressed NEF. How big is a compressed NEF exactly? There is some question about this still apparently.

Cheers

James

I just tok a selection of shots on NEF and checked the sizes and all are between 5MB and 5.5MB.

What are you taking pictures of? My guess is that you are taking picturs that do not have much detail or colour range so the camera is able to compress it considerably more than the camera was expecting. It's extimates uses some predetermined file size. So if the pictures you are taking have less detail than the factory predetermined average the files will be smaller than expected and the extimate will be low. The opposite will happen if you take pictures of very detailed subjects.

I just noticed the same thing on my D70 as well. According to the manual, 256 MB card will hold about 23 NEF images, each approximately 5mb. On my 1 GB card, the counter was initially at 93 shots, after taken 11 shots, the counter went down to 83, the NEF file size was between 4.9 to 5.2 mb. My feeling is that the counter is not going to be the most reliable way to figure out how many shots I have left in the camera. Hopefully tomorrow I will try to just keep shooting until I run out of CF card space and actually see how many shots I can fit on a card.

Good idea. Do that, and also check the forum at DPreview.com to learn more about compressed NEF.

Cheers

James

This may help:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp...message=7830755

Interesting post that and I just tried it.

Its true I just put the reformatted card in and had 95 shots to take, I then took 20 in a row and the counter does recalculate and then start counting backwards - after my 20 shots and watching the counter for a couple of seconds I now have 86 shots left. Now another 10 shots and have 82 left so it does calculate "on the fly"

Many Thanks to all! I can sleep soundly tonight!

Paul

OK, I just went ahead and filled my 1GB card. I got 199 shots before the card is full (4 or 5 were in JPEG, around 700-800K each and the rest were all NEF files). The writing speed seems very good as well. I use a Transcend 45x card and in sequential mode, after the buffer is full then I was shooting at about 1fps pretty smoothly afterward. I guess that would be just about the right recycle time for my Ikelite DS-125 strobe as well