[Leica] M8 and SD cards

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 8:21 PM -0400 3/23/07, Dante Stella wrote:
>For people who have used M8s for a while, do you need accelerated SD 
>cards with the camera?  Or is the normal SD write speed generally 
>sufficient for M-type pictures?  I don't see filling up a huge 
>buffer, and from what I have read, it would be 5 seconds write time 
>per card for standard-speed SD.
>
>The reason I ask is that my Kodak 14n really likes Microdrives or 
>accelerated CF - but when writing to the SD card, it doesn't seem to 
>care how fast the card is.
>
>Thanks
>Dante

Dante, the fast cards do make a difference. I've tried fast cards and 
slow cards and I've shot single shots and continuous, and I've tried 
DNG only, jpeg only and DNG and jpeg.

The fastest is DNG only on fast cards. The cards I've been using are 
the Sandisk Ultra II one and two GB cards, because that is what I had 
lying around. The slow are the PNY 2GB, because, well, they were 
really cheap.

In single DNG shots, the camera finished writing to the card in 
exactly half the time (as near as I can tell) as the slow card, and 
you can't press 'play' and see the image again until the writing has 
finished.

DNG is faster than jpeg by a large factor (nearly 2, depending on 
circumstances), and DNG plus jpeg is slowest. High quality or low 
quality or resolution size don't seem to make a lot of difference, 
although there is some. The time to flush the buffer after a string 
of 11 continuous shots is by far fastests with DNG only and a fast 
card, but here the card speed is a lot less important than doing DNG 
only.

These trials only took maybe 15min, and they gave me a clear idea of 
the performance to be expected.

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    *            Henning J. Wulff
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