Hi i just got A CANON EOS 400D i want to buy a memory card for it. i have my eye on a 8 gig card is it good?

Question

its a SanDisk 8GB/15MB Ultra II CF Card, its cheap bout $ 80

but there another 8 gig card also sand disk but "extreme" not ultra. which is alot more expensive

is it neccesary to spend extra on a card cause i take alot of photos and dont want the picture to be comprimise at all.

Answer 1

I had a 400D last year and because I do a lot of sports photography, a fast, high capacity card was crucial. For this enviornment I bought a Sandisk 8GB Ultra III

Other times if I'm just shooting family stuff or general things, I don't need a high capacity, high speed card, I'd usually just use my 2 or 4 GB card.

My advice is if price is an obstacle, think about the environment & camera settings you'll be shooting in.

If you shoot in an enviornment where the SPEED of the card is not necessary, get a slower card because it will be a lot cheaper.

If you shoot in an enviornment that doesn't permit you to even make (~30 sec) card swaps after you fill a card such as shooting at a fashion show, get a higher capacity card so you don't have to swap as often.

If you're shooting sports or at a wedding when sometimes you need to leave the finger on the trigger at crucial moments to catch the right pose, etc., these are where high capacity, fast cards are worthwhile having.

What some people don't understand is the Canon 400D will shoot at the same speed when writing to it's internal buffer, regardless of how fast your card is. Where the difference lies is how fast it can dump these images from the internal buffer to the memory card. If you shoot a sequence of 6 RAW images and have one 400D with a fast card, one with a slow card, both will shoot at the same speed for the first 6 images because the camera is writing the image to it's internal buffer first.

Where the difference lies is if you leave your finger on the trigger for both cameras, the camera with the faster card will be able to empty it's buffer onto the card quicker and will be able to take the next shot quicker than the camera with the slower card. The Canon 400D uses the FIFO method for loading & clearing it's buffer so to clear out the entire buffer completely to take the next 6 shots very quickly, you have to wait until the camera finishes writing all images to the memory card, and this is determined by the memory card's speed.

So once again, sometimes shooters are happy with getting just the first 6 shots really quickly because that's all they will require when a model does a turn at the end of the catwalk and can afford to wait for the buffer to empty it's contents to the card to capture the next 6 shots quickly in succession - in this scenario, having a faster memory card is not going to make a difference because you have the ability to wait for the buffer to clear between shooting the models doing thier turns.

However if you capture sports where you will almost definitely need to capture say, 16 frames in succession, a faster memory card will be needed because although the first 6 shots will be quick, the speed of the next 7 - 14 shots will be determined how quickly the camera's internal memory buffer can unload it's contents onto your memory card, and having a faster memory card will improve shooting in this situation.

Hope this helps, sorry if I babbled on a bit but I just had a Red Bull.

Cheers!

Answer 2

The Ultra will be just as good.  I have 3 cards presently:

ScanDisk 1G Ultra II

Kingston 2G

ScanDisk 4G Extreme (II or II, I can't remember)

And the only difference I notice between them is the size and sometimes the speed.

For instance, my extreme card write the photos very quickly.  Which means, I can take photo after photo with pause for several instances before my camera must stop to "catch up".  This is because the images are being written to the card.  When viewing my photos from the cards, it also reads them quicker.

BUT, those are very subtle differences that I have only noticed because I have three cards to compare.  If only had one of them, ANY one of them would be just as good.

The Ultra is a great card for the price.  I only bought the 4G extreme because it was 60% off at a store closing out of town.

Answer 3

I always carry a few 2gb cards with me, that way if one of them happens to get ruined I won't lose all my images (hopefully, fingers crossed).

The extremes are supposed to be faster, but I personally haven't used them.

Answer 4

Make sure that your camera will be compatible with the 8GB card first.  Personally I use a 4GB card in my Canon EOS 5D and carry two 2GB cards in my pack with the camera.  I have come close to filling one of the 2GB cards shooting a High School graduation in RAW mode.  I am sure that in a similar situation like a wedding for example I could fill the 4GB card.  but for the money stick with something smaller and cheaper and since the cards only take a few seconds to change carry a spare or two.  You can probably get three or four 2GB cards for the price of the one 8GB card that may not even work in your camera.