On Fri, 30 May 2008 09:14:53 +0800, "k"
wrote:


| and in a pocket PC i'm sure its the same, however as I'm sure no camera
| owner cares which camera is fastest,


| You might feel you are sure but it is not so. Many (most?)
| cameras are slower than what are now dirt cheap flash cards
| if you don't need over 4-8GB (or higher in the future), so
| the speed of the camera is what determines how long one has
| to wait inbetween shots. Sometimes the camera has a
| reasonably sided buffer, clipped


I beg to differ but it *is* so.

Only in a twisted argument. It is plainly obvious that
people care whether they have to wait several seconds just
to take another picture.



The point being that the camera is the non-variable in the equation, the
memory card is the variable.

For the purposes of your argument, true. For the purposes
of trying to isolate memory benchmarks if you refuse to pick
a faster camera, also true. For the purposes of the whole
point of this discussion, the reason why memory performance
matters, it is false. Fastest memory on earth in a slow
camera is maybe a little faster than mediocre memory, but
the mediocre memory in a fast camera is faster still.

I do get your point, but the reviews referenced previously
were in the context of photography, the entire resultant
performance and similarly so if performance really matters
with any device because a buyer can choose what they buy,
even if be the next camera since a flash card outlasts them
all if only it's reasonbly fast and reasonable capacity.
You'd have to be shooting a heck of a lot of pictures to
fill up a 8GB flash card quickly for example, unless it's in
raw mode.



The computer is the non variable, the pocketPC
the non variable .. the card again is the variable that we're discussing.

Yes, and no. We can insist that it has to be the only
variable in order for it to be a fair scientific test -
absolutely, but at the same time too much emphasis being
placed on small differences in performance are a waste of
time, who pays a lot more for some exotic memory card if it
ends up only being perhaps 20% faster?


No one asked which bus is faster, which CPU gives the faster transfer - the
original poster wanted to know (as per the subject line) how to do a speed
comparison on an SD card - that's the variable.

Agreed, but then the conversation drifted after that when
there were comments pertaining to the camera/card combos.


I have a pile of CF cards I
do noty use in my cameras because the transfer speed is sooooo slooow (!)
I know my camera will never be able to dump data at SCSI speeds but in the
case of these cards, they are the bottleneck. I even speed tested them with
the program I mentioned to get a *comparison* with my other cards and yes,
they are appallingly slow.

Ok, but we are speaking of modern cards now. It's quite
easy to buy a card that's bottlenecked by the camera, and
it's quite possible to have both the card and camera slowing
things down, not just necessarily being solely the blame of
one or the other.



And in using the program I suggested I was very surprised to find a cheapy
Chinese microSD card was a *lot* faster than my horribly expensive high
speed CF cards.

I was delighted to discover this, because although I wont
use the microSD in a CF adapter in my camea for the resons you point out, I
*will* use it in my pocketPC where the speed actually is noticable

The original posted wanted to know "My impression is that my old 150x card
is faster that the new class 6 SDHC card. Is there any way to verify if my
impression is true?"

the program I suggested would allow him to determine this (that card A is
faster / slower than card B)


Yes, and since you'd already written it, and I'd also
written something similar, it had seemed we moved past this
and onto new ground in the thread.

The subtopic would then be that we can seen someone looking
for the holy grail of flash card performance but they may
reach a dead end if their device simply isn't capable of
that. 150X that the OP saw was good, but even $10 USB
thumbdrives are that fast these days let alone pro grade
camera (marketed) cards.