Minimum speed CF card required for a 7D?

Question

What is the minimum speed CF card required for using a 7D for both recording 1080p video and also continuous shooting for RAW+JPEG?

Similar to Should I get a fast CF card? i essentially want to know if i need to buy a more expensive faster card or wether the standard cards are sufficient. Difference between questions is:

• a) I want to know what minimum speed is required.
• b) I will also be using it for video (i have seen in the past on other cameras video not recording correctly because an SD card was too slow).

Asked by mundeep

Answer

For video I believe the requirements would be a card that can write 10 MB/s (mega bytes per second). This equals to 66x speed for a Compact Flash card. For shooting stills it's possible to get a longer burst with a faster card. If you want maximum burst length, get the quickest CF card you can afford.

The math would be: 66 * 150kB/s = 9900kB/s ~ 10MB/s

• 66x = 10 mb/s = similar to Class 10 on SD cards
• 133x = 20 MB/s
• 200x = 30 MB/s
• 266x = 40 MB/s
• 333x = 50 MB/s
• 400x = 60 MB/s
• 466x = 70 MB/s
• 533x = 80 MB/s
• 600x = 90 MB/s

Answered by Håkon K. Olafsen

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