Musings on Photography

While I was traveling in China, on several occasions I had big photography days where I ended up with one or more really full memory cards. Recall that I was using 4GB Lexar 133x SDHC cards, and a little USB SDHC reader that came with the cards.

This gave me an opportunity to learn an important lesson. Copying 4GB of raw files off one of those SDHC cards was fast. Here, you may interpret ‘fast’ as meaning ’so much faster than copies off of my 80x CF cards using my USB CF reader that I was actually worried that I hadn’t gotten all the data off the card.’ I haven’t benchmarked the speed of the SDHC cards/SDHC reader against my CF cards and the CF reader but I expect the difference is a factor of at least four, and perhaps quite a bit more.

The difference is certainly a whole lot larger than comparing the 133x and 80x would lead you to expect. The enabling feature, apparently, is that the SDHC cards and the reader for them are UDMA capable.

Now, I don’t think this is a breakthrough that’s going to revolutionize photography. But the speed improvement is enough that, when I was copying images off the card onto my laptop, I noticed that it was only slightly slower to copy them off the SDHC card than copying them to my external hard disk to back them up. That’s pretty darn fast - and the speed means that you can sit and wait, as opposed to starting the copy, and then heading off to some other task while the copy runs.

I haven’t yet popped $120 a card for new CF cards to go in the EOS-5d, and another $40 or so for a UDMA capable reader. But I’m real, real close.