Canon 70d vs d7100 Buffer

[Apop]

Hey all, I just found a video on the 70d's buffer
With 95mb/sec it supposedly does 22 shots before slow down, which I think is pretty nice !
I am quite happy to see that they didn't limit the buffer ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuEtZb3ZNLA
( see 3 minute 58 to see the fast card)

A video on the Nikon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9R83frC6-w

In 3 seconds you get approximately 50% more shots (21)70d vs (14ish) d7100


I do wonder why there seems to be such a big difference between these cameras, which supposed to compete with each other.
Normally canon gets accused for protecting the next camera in the line, Now it seems nikon is protecting the yet to be released d400?.

Hope either one presents the d400/7dII soon, the good buffer on the 70d makes me wonder if the 7dII could have 30-35+ raw buffer!

 

[dgatwood]

The Nikon is processing 20% more data (24 MP vs. 20 MP), and presumably writing out 20% more data. That's part of the difference. The rest of the difference is likely in the size of the buffer.

 

[Apop]

The Nikon is processing 20% more data (24 MP vs. 20 MP), and presumably writing out 20% more data. That's part of the difference. The rest of the difference is likely in the size of the buffer.

yes fair , but the nikon d7000 also had a very poor buffer compared to the 60d

70d: 16 raw files ( shoots 22 with fast card before slowdown) (7fps)
d7100 6 raw files (slows down after 5-6, 5fps in 14 bit raw)
60d 16 raw files (5.3 fps)
d7000 10 raw (6fps)

I know the d7000-d7100 is from 16 to 24 mpixel,
but the canon went from 18 to 20 and retained the amount of shots that could be taken
I have always been annoyed by a small buffer since it should be fairly cheap to put more buffer memory in a camera.

When you shoot raw+jpg these numbers off course get worse.
I had it happen a few years ago with a river crossing of lions , where I used a d7000 and shot raw to one card, jpg as backup to the other, with a fairly slow card (45mb/s).
After only a few shots it went down to around 1fps .

Since then I have stopped backing up jpg to the second card slot and looked for a camera with slightly better buffer. I can understand to some people buffer doesn't matter at all , but I think it is also often overlooked when people are out to buy their first DSLR ( with the intention to shoot wildlife sports)

 

[Marsu42]

I do wonder why there seems to be such a big difference between these cameras, which supposed to compete with each other. Normally canon gets accused for protecting the next camera in the line, Now it seems nikon is protecting the yet to be released d400?.

Sure, why not? Both Canon & Nikon are companies that work for max profit, and the specs on all products are highly volatile and depend on marketing. Canon has the inferior sensor, so they have to do something about it (i.e. dual pixel live view af, ..., deeper buffer).

But nice to know Canon is under pressure and this manifests in better prices & specs, with the 60d vs d7000 it was a tie - the Nikon was faster, but slowed down after a few shots (so nice for bracketing, bad for longer bursts), while the Canon had slower fps but kept that up for a longer time.

 

[Sameer Thawani]

yes D7100 is pushing 50% more pixels, but end result is that the buffer is worse than the D7000. Bottomline is that it is less suited for continous shooting than the D7000 or 70D. Most likely deliberate on Nikon's part to create separation between the D7100 and the hypothetical D300S successor.

 

[Terry Rogers]

Okay, I just had a crazy thought that may or may not work... hear me out.

If a camera had dual card slots, could you get more shots off if every other shot was saved to alternating cards? Would that speed anything up? Would it allow for a longer burst of shots before the buffer filled since the buffer would be emptying faster (presumably)?

Just a thought.

 

[dgatwood]

Okay, I just had a crazy thought that may or may not work... hear me out.

If a camera had dual card slots, could you get more shots off if every other shot was saved to alternating cards? Would that speed anything up? Would it allow for a longer burst of shots before the buffer filled since the buffer would be emptying faster (presumably)?

If the writes are I/O bound and not CPU-bound. My guess is that throughput would increase dramatically, but it depends on how crippled the CPU and its memory bus are.

 

[Marsu42]

If a camera had dual card slots, could you get more shots off if every other shot was saved to alternating cards? Would that speed anything up?

Not if the bottleneck is a single interface to both cards, which is likely given the very fast speeds of recent cf or sd cards ... that's why Toshiba recently announced the uhs-2 standard with transfer speeds of 312mb/s.

 

[9VIII]

In sounds like this is one area where a person would be much better off with a 7D.

If they can get the MkII buffer to perform anything like the 1Dx I would be in heaven.

 

[dgatwood]

Not if the bottleneck is a single interface to both cards, which is likely given the very fast speeds of recent cf or sd cards ... that's why Toshiba recently announced the uhs-2 standard with transfer speeds of 312mb/s.

You mean a single flash card reader controller shared between the two slots? Ick. I mean you could do it that way, but I'm pretty sure that would mean that writing the same image to both cards would cut the write speed in half.