I have the compact flash memory cards for my Canon 20d and found out pretty fast abotu the speeds of the cards. i now have the professional 80x 1 gig and am able to snap about 10 image per second or something. before it was slow taking pics and uploading, so it's important to know what kinda of memory cards you need for what you do. any input?
-Bryan

Only 10 per second?

I'm kidding...that's amazing! Is that also because of the buffer of the 20D?

I must have one of them...I simply MUST!

faster is better!!

are you shooting RAW or jpg?

in any event, you are not hitting the speed limits of your card, not even coming close... you could have saved some loot and bought a 60x or 40x card and you will see that the write times are the same.

media is so fast now that camera's can't keep up w/ it... which is good because people are upgrading dslr bodies about every 12-18 months or so, at least thats what i see.

i have noticed however that transfering images from my lexar 80x card to my portable storage device or when used in a usb 2.0 card reader to a computer that the transfer speeds are much faster

you're actually taking 5 per second on your 20d (at most).  The memory card also doesn't affect how many you can take in a  sequence.  I use the cheap cards and the 80x ones, they make no difference on my 1d at 8fps (because the images are stored in the buffer before being written to the card).  Writing from the buffer is slightly slower on the cheaper cards though.

I shoot JPEG normally, and i thik 5 per second is around what it is on average sometime more or less. I have not quite figured out the best way to shoot RAW without getting too much colour noise so I stick to JPEG. But I am loosing out on size and such. any advise?

Posted by Mike Panic: 
are you shooting RAW or jpg?

in any event, you are not hitting the speed limits of your card, not even coming close... you could have saved some loot and bought a 60x or 40x card and you will see that the write times are the same.

media is so fast now that camera's can't keep up w/ it... which is good because people are upgrading dslr bodies about every 12-18 months or so, at least thats what i see.

i have noticed however that transfering images from my lexar 80x card to my portable storage device or when used in a usb 2.0 card reader to a computer that the transfer speeds are much faster

screw the size, you are loosing out on the ability to post process properly!!

when you shoot raw and edit in ps cs or phase one's capture one software, you have the ability to under / overexpose by up to 3 full stops, and the ability to change white balance, tweak density and bring out shadow detail, all before you get to the file

editing in 16bit is def the way your workflow should go.  im unaware of any pro level lab that prints 16bit, and frankly your eyes and monitor can't see a differance, but mathmaticly there is a big differnce

so start shooting raw, work out a workflow and then save your files to be printed (in a different directory) as 8bit

I never shoot jpeg, unless i'm doing a sequence for snowboarding/skateboarding.  Raw all the way, just make sure you meter properly, and shoot at low iso if you can, but I was pretty sure the 20d is top notch up to 800iso.

Your camera shoots at a max of 5fps if you have the highspeed drive on, if you don't it's probably in the area of 3fps.

cheers

This site has all you need to know about card speed:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp

Don't pay too much for performance you can't use.  OTOH, sometimes spending a few bucks does make a difference.

yeah i need to get a meter for it but don't know the best one to buy, i want a remote trigger to, but thats $70 I dont have which is funny since I did buy the camera, lol.
-B

Posted by Brian: 
I never shoot jpeg, unless i'm doing a sequence for snowboarding/skateboarding.  Raw all the way, just make sure you meter properly, and shoot at low iso if you can, but I was pretty sure the 20d is top notch up to 800iso.

Your camera shoots at a max of 5fps if you have the highspeed drive on, if you don't it's probably in the area of 3fps.

cheers

I never shoot jpeg because of not only loss in the ability of proceessing the digital neg via RAW, but every time you open your jpeg photo in any program (i.e. photoshop) and work on it then save, you are killing your info. Jpeg is a compression file, so every time you save, it compresses every 5 pixels into 1.... loss of data, loss of quality BAD BAD BAD. And not to mention not having 16 bit files to work in. If you work in 16bit, you have approx. 16,000 colors available in your file, but 8 bit files have only 256 colors!!! 
I personally bought by DSLR for mainly having RAW capabilities that the consumer rate cameras just dont have

I have to San Disk Ultra's . 1.0 GB and 2.0 GB.

I shoot mostly RAW and I love em'. I get decent results shooting at any iso. You do have to make sure you custom white balance though.

The place where you'll notice the speed of the card the most is in write speed (so when shooting RAW, it will have an effect on how quickly the camera can clear shots from the buffer, and whether you'll "run out" of shots while taking a quick sequence) and when reviewing photos.

I'm not sure what you mean by RAW having more color noise, this really shouldn't be the case and ultimately depends on what RAW utility you're using. I use DPP almost exclusively and shoot quite regularly at 1600 or higher - with a lot of my sports work being 3200 or even pushing up to 6400. Color noise is easily taken care of with a noise reduction program, and the left over luminance noise on the 20D files is really pretty kickass. I sell a lot of ISO 6400 shots at 8x10 and haven't had a single complaint and many many praises.

I have 2 lexar 40x speeds for my D70.  For a 20D, those 80x speeds work great.