Last year diving in Cozumel, I was a bit perturbed at the cycle speed of my Nikon 4300. I missed several shots waiting for the camera to save images between shots. :11: I'm getting ready to go again - so I thought I'd run some tests. I shoot with the flash on and in macro mode most of the time. After a shot, the LCD screen would show the picture for several seconds - then go black. A couple of seconds would pass and an hourglass would appear. :clock: After a total of 10 or 11 seconds the LCD would return and I could take another picture. I tried pressing the shutter halfway during this process - as I've read that the picture is saved to a buffer; and you can take another picture while the current one is being saved. This did not work for me - the hourglass stayed until the 11 seconds expired regardless of any actions on my part.
I've read on several forums that faster CF cards help this problem and can reduce cycle times to about 5 seconds. I've also read that any card larger than 128Mb will slow the process down. One person said that he has a SanDisk 512Mb Ultra II card (9Mb/sec - about 60x) that worked pretty fast - so I thought I'd try one in spite of the "large card" warning. Yesterday, I stopped by Circuit City - they have the card for $80 before a $15 rebate. I took my camera so I could test the card (I'd return it immediately if there were no improvement). Using the same settings (macro+flash) the card cycled in under 5 seconds - and to my surprise :biggrin2: the screen never went black and there was no hourglass. I could also now press the shutter halfway immediately after taking a picture and take another picture (with LCD display) after only a couple of seconds. I could take at least three or four this way with no slowdown. Great! Of course I wanted to verify the speed against the old card, so I stuck my old 256Mb card back in and tried the same test. The speed of the old card was still pretty close to the new card! I've not been able to reproduce the original slow condition since using the faster card. Go figure. :wazzup:
I've read on several forums that faster CF cards help this problem and can reduce cycle times to about 5 seconds. I've also read that any card larger than 128Mb will slow the process down. One person said that he has a SanDisk 512Mb Ultra II card (9Mb/sec - about 60x) that worked pretty fast - so I thought I'd try one in spite of the "large card" warning. Yesterday, I stopped by Circuit City - they have the card for $80 before a $15 rebate. I took my camera so I could test the card (I'd return it immediately if there were no improvement). Using the same settings (macro+flash) the card cycled in under 5 seconds - and to my surprise :biggrin2: the screen never went black and there was no hourglass. I could also now press the shutter halfway immediately after taking a picture and take another picture (with LCD display) after only a couple of seconds. I could take at least three or four this way with no slowdown. Great! Of course I wanted to verify the speed against the old card, so I stuck my old 256Mb card back in and tried the same test. The speed of the old card was still pretty close to the new card! I've not been able to reproduce the original slow condition since using the faster card. Go figure. :wazzup:
