Memory card speeds help?

[mike62]

Big question on cards. I am upgrading my Minolta S414 looking at the Sony H1, Canon S2, Panasonic FZ5 or 20, or the Minolta Z5. Does the "ultra" or "high speed" cards make a BIG difference on shutter lag? I was at Circuit City last night and tried the S2 but all they had was a regular SD card and the girl said the faster cards made a BIG diffenrece in writing time. I was also at Wolf Camera and tried the Z5 and it was pretty fast but did not ask which card they had in it.

Will the faster cards make a SIGNIFICANT improvement on the shutter lag/writing time versus just regular cards? Thanks.

[Chucko]

Are you asking about shutter lag or write time? Shutter lag (the delay between pushing the button and the picture being captured) is independent of the speed of the flash card.

A faster card helps when you are trying to take a series of pictures as fast as the camera will allow. But it only helps if the camera circuitry is fast enough to take advantage of the faster card.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but there is a database of flash card speeds with various dSLRs here:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...e.asp?cid=6007

You can see that on some (mostly older) cameras, a faster card won't do squat for write speed, but on the newer models, they make a huge difference.

[mike62]

Yes, what I guess I mean is I would like to be able to take pictures as fast as I can press the shutter (or the camera will allow) and does the faster card aid in this? I am down to the H1, S2, FZ5, and maybe Z5 (Minolta). Thanks.

[David Metsky]

Yes, what I guess I mean is I would like to be able to take pictures as fast as I can press the shutter (or the camera will allow) and does the faster card aid in this? I am down to the H1, S2, FZ5, and maybe Z5 (Minolta). Thanks.

Not really. It may determine how many shots you can take at maximum burst mode speed, but it's not really going to take shots much slower until you exhaust the cache. In burst mode, you aren't redoing the calculations that cause shutter lag between shots.

Not sure about the camera models you are looking at.

-dave-