memory card ?

[BAKatz]

Hi everyone..learning and loving my EPL-1. Still in I-auto, but hey i'm learning. Anyway, my question is about our memory card. I have a cat6 installed now. is this necessary? Also, what is the difference between cat6 and cat10? many thanks....

 

[Streetshooter]

Ba,
Class 6 is minimum to use for write/transfer speed.
I use class 10 and see a difference between that and class 6. Many here have stated that it doesn't matter what class the card is...dunno, I see a difference.
So, getting started... Use what ya have and don't worry about card upgrade.
Just make sure to format the card everytime you upload the images to the computer.

 

[mauve]

All about cards here :
Secure Digital - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Class 6 is the right speed for the e-pl1. If you're doing only pictures and no video, a class 4 is certainly enough (the camera first records images to an internal fast memory, then writes to the card; the internal memory can hold about 15 pictures at max resolution, so if don't shoot continuously, the camera has ample time to empty its buffer between shots).

Faster cards are necessary for film because the card needs to be as fast as the camera to record.

Cheers,

Mauve

 

[bilzmale]

Faster cards are necessary for film because the card needs to be as fast as the camera to record.

I assume you meant "video" when you typed "film" - showing your age? :smile:

 

[squeegee]

I use a card that's not even class 2, it seems to work fine and records video fine on the e-p1 :smile:

 

[ill_dawg]

I thought that class 6 matched the max transfer speed of the pen, and that the point of a class 10 card was faster transfer to your computer and compatibility with future cameras; I could be wrong, though. I have a class 6 and a class 10 that I use, and I can't tell the difference while they're in the camera.

 

[Brianetta]

Class 2 is fine for stills. I used a class 2 for a video, and it started to ditch frames after a couple of minutes in an attempt to keep up. I have class 6 cards, and they're fine - which is probably why they were recommended.

One other advantage of higher speed cards is how quickly you can get images off them again - assuming your card reader is a fast one, and they do vary wildly. Alas, the class doesn't matter so much here. When it comes to reading, my SanDisk class 2 is faster than my "play.com" class 6. It's also faster at writing, certainly for small files. The class only guarantees a minimum write speed, which is what matters when recording video. It's a guarantee that there won't be a buffer overrun, where incoming frames arrive in the buffer faster than they can be saved.

My fastest card is a Kingston 60x 2GB SD card. It out-performs my SDHC cards by nearly double, reading and writing, although I don't know whether it can sustain its write speeds at a minimum rate. I was testing average speeds over a gigabyte. During that time, the write rate could have fallen to a rate that was below that needed for HD video.

 

[mauve]

I assume you meant "video" when you typed "film" - showing your age? :smile:

In fact, it's mostly showing my mother tongue. In french, the word film is synonymous with the word movie in english and isn't used to describe the physical medium itself. This we call a 'pellicule'.

So in french it's possible to watch "un film vidéo".

Thanks for spotting this, made me chuckle when I realised the confusion.

 

[Streetshooter]

Dunno...fer sure dunno...
Maybe I see a difference because I paid a high price for my Class 10 cards....
Where I saw a marked difference was with the Pen & the art filters.
Youse figure it out and learn me the difference...
Thanks

 

[edb]

Ba,
Class 6 is minimum to use for write/transfer speed.
I use class 10 and see a difference between that and class 6. Many here have stated that it doesn't matter what class the card is...dunno, I see a difference.
So, getting started... Use what ya have and don't worry about card upgrade.
Just make sure to format the card everytime you upload the images to the computer.

Streetshooter,

Just curious, but why would you need to reformat your SD card each time you upload images to your computer?

I have to admit that I don't do that and have never had a problem with my cards.

Maybe I've just been lucky.

 

[squeegee]

Just curious, but why would you need to reformat your SD card each time you upload images to your computer?

Well technically you don't have to.

Some people have noticed that it slows down after a lot of write/deletes. There was a minor discussion on some thread here about that before. I think the high level consensus / guess is that it suffers from the same issue that solid state hard drives do with continuous writing / deleting - the summary is that SSD HD's slow down after using them for a while until you reformat them. (we won't split hairs about trim and other work around attempts at speeding this issue up). So, we kind of extrapolated that the same solution of formatting the SD cards would help like formatting the SSD HD's.

It appears that it worked for resolving a few peoples issues with saving pictures taking longer after a while. I don't think anyone has done any empirical study on this yet though... I might be wrong.

 

[deirdre]

Fascinating. Maybe I'll do that next time I've uploaded.

Aside: are photos on the GF-1 completely sequential? I can't possibly have taken 40k pictures in a month, can I? I'm sure it's been more than 4k and my last upload was over 1400.....

 

[mauve]

Some people have noticed that it slows down after a lot of write/deletes. There was a minor discussion on some thread here about that before. I think the high level consensus / guess is that it suffers from the same issue that solid state hard drives do with continuous writing / deleting - the summary is that SSD HD's slow down after using them for a while until you reformat them. (we won't split hairs about trim and other work around attempts at speeding this issue up). So, we kind of extrapolated that the same solution of formatting the SD cards would help like formatting the SSD HD's.

Yes, but, caveat ! SSD have a built in controller dedicated to even up the wear among the whole disk. Each memory cell has a write/delete limit after which it becomes "stuck" and it's better to spread r/w to avoid frequently addressed bytes to become useless really quickly.

I suppose formatting kind of reset this controller. Writing is again faster because contiguous cells are addressed (sd is a serial memory format), but the wear falls almost always at the low addresses of the card.

Depending on the brand and quality, limit to write/delete cycles can be as low as 10.000 or up to 100.000. But when speaking of computers, that's pretty low in any case.

 

[edb]

Thanks for all the information.