300D and/or 20D taking advantage of faster CF cards?

[elbirth]

A friend of mine claims he read on DPreview that the 300D benefits a lot from faster cards (40x, 60x, 80x, etc), but the 20D does not- said that the 20D has such a big buffer that it doesn't really even NEED to, so it doesn't.

That doesn't seem to make sense to me.... Next week my 2gig CF card will be here so I can test my 20D's speed on normal cards and write accelerated cards, but in the meantime... which way is it?

Got any links to proof that explain it?

[Ogrt48]

Thats backwards..
The 300D doesn't benefit from faster cards, the 20D does though.

[pcasciola]

The 20D speed range on about 40 cards tested is 1.3MB/sec to 6Mb/sec, while the 300D ranges from 700KB/sec to 1.3MB/sec. So going from worst to best on the 20D is over a 300% improvement from slowest to fastest, while on the 300D it's only about a 90% improvement. As far as not "needing" it on the 20D, that could be true when shooting JPEG, but the RAW buffer is not so big on the 20D (same as the 10D), so that's when you would really need it. I guess if you always shoot JPEG and never take 30+ shots in a 10-15 second period, then yes, the speed of the card will make no difference on a 20D.

[pcasciola]

Oh yeah, here are the links you asked for.

300D CF tests:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-6425

20D CF tests:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-7303

[elbirth]

just as I thought.... I was trying to figure out what he meant, because, if nothing else, the 20d is newer technology than the 300d, so it should naturally be able to take advantage of it, but not the 300d.

Thanks a lot for the links as well.

[Jon]

The 300D won't be able to use the new, faster, cards to their fullest capabilities. It will be able to write to them almost twice as fast as the slower cards, however. Because it's got a markedly smaller buffer than the 20D and it is more constrained as to when it can write from the buffer to the card, it will benefit more than the 20D when you're shooting a lot of photos in a very short time. This will be more apparent when you're shooting RAW, but if you're trying to maintain a high shooting rate or using either of the bracketing options it'll be significant in JPEGs as well. As the 20D is more flexible in when it can write to the card, and as even the slowest card in the 20D is about as fast as the fastest in the DR, you'll see less relative improvement when using faster cards in the 20D.

[S230]

I tired several speeds of cards and noticed speed differences. Brands also makes a difference. I have Lexar's 4x, 12x and recently the 80x also tried Sandisks and Kingstons (Unknown speed).
the Lexar 4x is noticably slow while the 12x is better.
the 80x is much faster.
Sandisk is slow and assuming it's only 12x
Kingston is quite fast.
What I find important since most are using larger memory cards and using larger files, transferring to computer afterwards, faster memory cards is very important because you don't want to wait forever transferring files from your Card to PC.
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Also, to note I did try the 80x on a Nik*n D70 and is not as fast as it would work on the 300D. It works better using Sandisks? Not sure why.

Hope this helps. This is non-scientific findings and are from my personal experience. :)