HELP ! Memory card compatibility for 1D mark III ?

[dgatwood]

As I said, my MkIII's (though they are 1Ds's) slow down when I put SD cards in them, the fastest rates I get with the various cards I actually own are when I just have Sandisk CF cards in the CF slot and nothing in the SD slot, every SD card I own is slower than the various CF cards I own.

You are correct. Even the fastest SD cards are blown away by a fast CF card. In a mark III, the fastest write speed you will get with SD is 10mB/sec, most are 5. The card specs are misleading to a extreme.

No, the specs of the flash card aren't misleading. Fast speeds simply require you to have a device that supports that speed. Unfortunately, the 5D Mark III doesn't support UHS-I, so the flash card falls back to pre-UHS-I speeds.

AFAIK, the only Canon DSLRs that support UHS-I speeds are the 6D, the 70D, the SL1, the T4i, and the T5i. On the 6D, the difference between a 30 MBps Sandisk card and a 95 MBps Sandisk card is like night and day.

 

[Occams_Cat]

Never owned a 1D3 but a friend of mine did until recently. He used a bunch of Sandisk Extreme 3 8GB SD cards simply because they were cheap and faster than any CF cards in that camera. It would appear that the 1D3 is the only dual card format camera that is actually faster with SD rather than CF!

Yep, this is true. The 1D3 is much faster writing to SD cards than any CF. I wish Canon would drop this annoying dual format memory card malarkey. Just give us two super fast CF slots in the Pro series and an SD in the consumer range.

 

[Deleted member 91053]

Never owned a 1D3 but a friend of mine did until recently. He used a bunch of Sandisk Extreme 3 8GB SD cards simply because they were cheap and faster than any CF cards in that camera. It would appear that the 1D3 is the only dual card format camera that is actually faster with SD rather than CF!

Yep, this is true. The 1D3 is much faster writing to SD cards than any CF. I wish Canon would drop this annoying dual format memory card malarkey. Just give us two super fast CF slots in the Pro series and an SD in the consumer range.

They have in the 1DX and it works well. With my 1D4 I could get 23-25 RAW files before the buffer filled at 9fps. With the 1DX I get 30+ with a Traanscend 400X CF card (same card as I used in the 1D4) and 50+ files with a Lexar 1000x at 10 fps.
Good improvement - pity about the price!

 

[Occams_Cat]

Never owned a 1D3 but a friend of mine did until recently. He used a bunch of Sandisk Extreme 3 8GB SD cards simply because they were cheap and faster than any CF cards in that camera. It would appear that the 1D3 is the only dual card format camera that is actually faster with SD rather than CF!

Yep, this is true. The 1D3 is much faster writing to SD cards than any CF. I wish Canon would drop this annoying dual format memory card malarkey. Just give us two super fast CF slots in the Pro series and an SD in the consumer range.

They have in the 1DX and it works well. With my 1D4 I could get 23-25 RAW files before the buffer filled at 9fps. With the 1DX I get 30+ with a Traanscend 400X CF card (same card as I used in the 1D4) and 50+ files with a Lexar 1000x at 10 fps.
Good improvement - pity about the price!

That's a good point, I didn't realise this. The 1Dx sort of washed over me since I am (and so are my clients) still happy with the 1d MK3 & 4 files and those two cameras do the job so well. I'm sure that the bigger burst mode would be very useful at time as I get ~16 from the 1D3 and the same as you with the 4.

I'll have to wait a little longer for the 1Dx, as you said, pity about the price

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

As I said, my MkIII's (though they are 1Ds's) slow down when I put SD cards in them, the fastest rates I get with the various cards I actually own are when I just have Sandisk CF cards in the CF slot and nothing in the SD slot, every SD card I own is slower than the various CF cards I own.

You are correct. Even the fastest SD cards are blown away by a fast CF card. In a mark III, the fastest write speed you will get with SD is 10mB/sec, most are 5. The card specs are misleading to a extreme.

No, the specs of the flash card aren't misleading. Fast speeds simply require you to have a device that supports that speed. Unfortunately, the 5D Mark III doesn't support UHS-I, so the flash card falls back to pre-UHS-I speeds.

AFAIK, the only Canon DSLRs that support UHS-I speeds are the 6D, the 70D, the SL1, the T4i, and the T5i. On the 6D, the difference between a 30 MBps Sandisk card and a 95 MBps Sandisk card is like night and day.

Yes, they are misleading. They only apply to a new card. As soon as you use the card, and do a normal in camera format, the speed drops to 10MB/sec. To recover the speed, you need to do a low level format / erase of the SD card. Do that with a 64GB card, and you will be waiting for it to finish for a long time, since it must write 0's to every memory sell on the card.

People believe the hype without understanding the limitations. You do not see the issue with CF cards. My 1D MK III was far faster with a CF card.

Sometimes the specs are up front about this. For example, they post a maximum and minimum speed here. The Maximum speed is only for a blank card in a camera with UHS-1. A Class 10 card has a 10MB/sec minimum write speed, and that is what users will see once the card has been written to.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/844763-REG/SanDisk_SDSDU_064G_A11_64GB_SDXC_Memory_Card.html

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/917678-REG/sony_sf64uy_tqmn_64gb_sdxc_memory_card.html