As part of an upgrade from a Canon 50D to a 7D, I decided it made sense to get a faster memory card for
high speed shooting.
The PhotoFast 533X Plus Compact Flash cards have gotten some positive
writeups and with UDMA 6 support, they claim to have 90 MB/second read and write speed.
But how well would they perform in real world testing - turns out
pretty darn fast!
Conclusion: The PhotoFast 533X Plus 16 GByte Card is pretty fast, and while it won't give you a lot more frames in a 5 second burst, the recovery time is noticeably quicker - nice to see the "frames left" number in the lower right ratchet up quickly. Both can really make a difference when you are shooting action stuff - plus $146 (Oct/2009) is about half of the other brands.
In May/2016, I picked up a used 7DM2, which shoots at 10fps. Here's a comparison of different CF cards - my data below.
I set my Canon7D to 1/1000s, ISO 200, F/2.8 (decent exposure for a test target) and did a 5 second burst, using both RAW and RAW+JPEG. Note that the Canon specification for maximum burst at 8fps for those settings is 15 and 6 respectively (126 for JPEG only) ... so in all cases, the camera slowed down, and resumed shooting sporadically as the buffer was cleared to the card. I pretty much always shoot RAW, so this is not only a better test case, but more realistic. I then timed how long from first pushing the shutter it took to write all the files to the CF memory card - i.e. when the red light went out.
| Frames shot in 5 second burst and total time to write to Compact Flash Card | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firmware 1.2.5 | Firmware 2.0.0 | ||||
| Compact Flash | RAW | RAW+JPEG | RAW | RAW+JPEG | |
| Lexar 600X 16GB | 28f/12s | 20f/11s | 32f/13s | 22f/16s | |
| PhotoFast 533X Plus 16GB | 28f/12s | 20f/11s | 32f/13s | 22f/15s | |
| Transcend 400X 64GB | 28f/20s | 20f/18s | |||
| Transcend 300X UDMA | 25f/17s | 18f/17s | |||
| Transcend 133X non-UDMA | 24f/44s | 16f/40s | |||
Conclusion: The PhotoFast 533X Plus 16 GByte Card is pretty fast, and while it won't give you a lot more frames in a 5 second burst, the recovery time is noticeably quicker - nice to see the "frames left" number in the lower right ratchet up quickly. Both can really make a difference when you are shooting action stuff - plus $146 (Oct/2009) is about half of the other brands.
In May/2016, I picked up a used 7DM2, which shoots at 10fps. Here's a comparison of different CF cards - my data below.
| 7DM2 with Firmware 1.05 | RAW |
|---|---|
| Lexar 1066x 32GB | 41f/10.5s |
| Lexar 600X 16GB | 30f/16s |
| PhotoFast 533X Plus 16GB | 29f/16s |
PhotoFast 533X Plus 16 GByte CF Card
PhotoFast 533X Plus, Transcend UDMA, and Transcend non-UDMA Compact Flash Cards
In April/2010, I tested the Transcend 400x 64 GByte card - wanted for African Safari Pictures
Even when shooting lots of hi-def video of House Finches nesting on my front door, still plenty of capacity!
I welcome any comments on all of this.
More camera stuff.