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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What is the maximum CF card size for a FujiFilm FinePix S1?

Question

My fiance just got a free FujiFilm FinePix S1. An old camera, I know, but also perfect for helping her learn the basics behind photography.

Anyway, we aren't experts on storage at all. We can see that for SmartMedia cards, the max is 64MB. Does anyone know the maximum for the CompactFlash cards? Does CompactFlash work like that, with the memory limits, the way that SD kind of works? Would a 4GB (or larger) Type I card from BestBuy work? Or does the operating system have a size limit?

Any information at all about this specific camera or CompactFlash in general will be greatly appreciated.

Answer

The file system for the camera (given the era, the cards available at the time and their price) is probably FAT (FAT16). There's no indication anywhere that the camera is capable of using FAT32. If that's the case, you won't be able to use cards bigger than 2GB, and may find that only 1GB is addressable.

While they're not nearly as commonly available as cards weighing in at 4GB and up, you can still find 1GB and 2GB cards at very reasonable prices (under $20). Don't worry about the speed ratings -- all of the currently-available cards will read and write faster than the cards of c. 2000 (except the microdrive, which was really rather snappy).

Unfortunately, Fuji's two non-JPEG formats are TIFF, so you won't be able to get very many shots on a card unless you use JPEG, and there is no RAW format. JPEG Fine should be good enough for most purposes, though, and the bit-depth limitation might actually help to learn about exposure, white balance, etc.

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How fast must a CF be to save 2560x1920 TIFF?

Question

I have an Olympus E-20P which is 10 years old with a 256MB CompactFlash card.

It won't let me choose 2560x1920 TIFF, so I assume that my CompactFlash isn't fast enough.

Are there any rule of thumbs for what speed is needed to save 2560x1920?

Update

According to the manual:

• RAW, 2560x1920, ~10MB
• TIFF, 2560x1920, ~15MB
• SHQ, 2560x1920, ~3.9MB
• HQ, 2560x1920, ~1.5MB

When the camera is powered on it selects HQ, and even if I choose TIFF, it won't change.

So I suspect that it is my "Sandisk CF SDCFB-256" with 3.6MB/s that is the problem.

Answer

I happened to notice this from the FAQ I referenced in the answer to your last question:

Question: If I purchase a high performance CompactFlash card for my E-10/20N, will it reduce the time writing to the media.

Answer: No, the writing time is controlled by the camera, not by the Media.

In other words, it won't help.

(This mentions the "N" version, but as I understand it the only difference is video out format, NTSC vs. PAL.)

And this review say that this camera can only save TIFF in 2560 × 1920 — so something else is going on.

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Can an Olympus E20P take 8GB flash cards?

Question

I have an Olympus E20P camera that is about 10 years old, and the manual says it supports

3V (3.3V) SmartMedia: 4 MB, 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB;

CompactFlash (type I and II) Microdrive (CF + type II standard)

Right now I am using a CompactFlash/Microdrive 256MB, which seems to work.

Does anyone know if a 8GB CompactFlash or SmartMedia will work?

Answer

The E20 FAQ from Olympus says that CompactFlash-interface microdrives up to "1gig" are supported. That doesn't necessarily mean that bigger cards won't work, though — unlike SmartMedia, CF doesn't require device support for larger capacities, since there's a standard interface with "smarts" in the card itself. ("Smartmedia" is an Orwellian misnomer; it's the exact opposite — which is one of the reasons it failed to catch on.)

But, it's also very likely that there are other limits that prevent a card much larger than the expected to work. (For one thing, you may run into a limitation on FAT volume size.) You could chance it — it may work. Or you can get a 1GB card which will almost certaily be no problem.

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How can I recover photo files from a CF memory card with a corrupt filesystem?

Question

I know this is not specifically a photography issue but since many of us with prosumer/professional-level DLSRs use Compact Flash cards, it is bound to happen to others as well.

I have a Sandisk 16GB Ultra card that occasionally had the camera reporting inability to access the card. I had to reinsert the card to continue using it. I was able to read the card and transfer the photo files to my computer drive. Today, the same thing happened again, just that nearing the capacity of the card, it failed one last time and the camera was subsequently unable to read it anymore. Despite reinsertion.

My other CF cards never once exhibited this problem, so it's pretty much isolated to this card.

The card is similarly unrecognisable on my computer CF card reader. I think the filesystem is toast, but I suspect the photo files are still intact. I would like to find ways where I can inspect the raw binary data in the card and hopefully recover the photos?

Answer

There are two utilities from CGSecurity that might help.

• TestDisk - Allows direct access to disk data and file recovery from corrupt partition tables.
• PhotoRec - Specifically targeted at recovering photos by identifying byte patterns in images (& video) files.

Depending on what has caused your card to fail will depend on which of these tools will work best.

You can use TestDisk to do a raw backup of the card first to prevent further damage by using recovery tools incorrectly.

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