CF versus SD on 5D mark III

Since the 5D3 supports both, suppose I use only one card, is there a reason to stick with CF? Price for high speeds compact flash cards is easily double than SD. Are CF cards more reliable or fast? Or is there any other reason to stick to CF ? Currently in need for some more storage, so need to decide to get Sd or Cf but I wont buy anything holding my camera back.

CF cards are (if you're buying into pro level ones) available with much higher data transfer speeds than even the fastest SD cards on the market. Given the 5D3 supports both I'd set it up with a high speed CF card for recording RAW image and have it export JPEGS to an SD card that way you shoot both and if you get a shot that's perfect with your settings for JPEG it means less editing. It also makes it faster to go through the images and cull the crappy shots. Even non pro CF cards are smoking most class 10 SD cards though. I've got a 266x Kingston 16GB CF card that's about 30% faster than the fastest class 10 cards on the market at the moment and it was $17 on sale.

The 5D3 is ridiculously slow when shooting to the SD card. It keeps up with all the rest when writing to a CF card.

Only reason to use the SD is if you rely on shooting to two cards (like I do.)

There is an issue with the 5d3 not being able to utelise high speed SD cards. Kind of a dud idea on Canon's part. Have two card slots, but wait, if you want to use the SD cards we have to slow down the camera first...not cool. Which is why I stick to CF cards.

In my experience SD cards seem to be more prone to file corruption. I haven't yet had a CF card to get corrupt.

Miki G wrote in post #15903976
In my experience SD cards seem to be more prone to file corruption. I haven't yet had a CF card to get corrupt.

What's the sample size of your experience?

Thomas Campbell wrote in post #15903832
The 5D3 is ridiculously slow when shooting to the SD card. It keeps up with all the rest when writing to a CF card....

Thndr_strck wrote in post #15903899
There is an issue with the 5d3 not being able to utelise high speed SD cards. Kind of a dud idea on Canon's part. Have two card slots, but wait, if you want to use the SD cards we have to slow down the camera first...not cool. Which is why I stick to CF cards.

Canon cheaped out on the SD card support in the 5DIII. If you need speed, you'll have to use CF only.

RTPVid wrote in post #15904211
What's the sample size of your experience?

I've used 4GB cards (SD), but have also used higher capacity cards. They are slower than CF & tend to get more errors & corrupt files. Nowadays, I only use CF cards.

I use both, whichever happens to be on hand and has space. I have not had any issues at all with SD cards in my 5DIII, but then I don't tend to shoot on burst for several seconds continuously.

I have never had a corrupt file from SD cards from any camera. I only use Sandisk, 4-16GB, regular (blue), ultra and extreme.

I use cf cards mostly, but have sd as backup. Cf definitely 'feels' faster.

Here's an article on this topic. What do you think?

http://jeffcable.blogs​pot.com …-put-sd-card-in-your.html

lapino wrote in post #15903801
Since the 5D3 supports both, suppose I use only one card, is there a reason to stick with CF? Price for high speeds compact flash cards is easily double than SD. Are CF cards more reliable or fast? Or is there any other reason to stick to CF ? Currently in need for some more storage, so need to decide to get Sd or Cf but I wont buy anything holding my camera back.

CF cards are pretty cheap these days !

Cheap? A fast Sandisk 16gb costs about 80-100 euro here. A 16gb sd around 30 euro.

Is the SD card slow even when your writing video to it?

Sirrith wrote in post #15909645
. . . I have not had any issues at all with SD cards in my 5DIII, but then I don't tend to shoot on burst for several seconds continuously. . . . I have never had a corrupt file from SD cards from any camera. I only use Sandisk, 4-16GB, regular (blue), ultra and extreme.

I too don't burst rapid fire just fire sometimes as fast as I can click and since switching to SanDisk I've never had a file corruption issue. With other card manufacturers I've not only had file corruption but also complete card failure.

I will shoot the 5DM3 with SD cards because I have a drawer full of 32 GB SanDisk Extreme's from my former video business