*istDS and Memory Card speeds

Can anyone tell if the istDS writes data faster to the faster memory cards.? I have just recently tried shooting Raw images and was suprised how long the 'data writing light' on the camera stayed lit after taking a shot and using a bog standard Jessops memory card. I therefore purchased a 512Mb Sandisk Ultra card thinking that would speed things up a bit, but was disapointed to find that writing did not seem to be any faster. Does this mean that the writing speed is a limitation of the camera, if so one might as well purchase the cheaper memory cards. Am I missing something here. ?????

My experience is that high speed cards are significantly quicker. I've just done a quick test using my standard speed Kingston card and my high speed Bytestore card (a cheapie from Amazon) and the write speed for a RAW fle was roughly 9 seconds for the former and 5 seconds for the latter

BTW I wouldn't buy cards from Jessops - they are much cheaper online

My much maligned IBM Microdrive is only one second slower to write a *ist D RAW file than my Lexar Write Accelerated 80x card.

As for Jessops cards, my daughter bought a 256k card in one of their branches and when she got home she found two cards in the bag - one of them was a 512k card. They don't come much cheaper than that.

Jessops are good like that.

I remember buying a Kodak DC240 from them (a long time ago) that came with a paltry 4Mb card but had a 16Mb card in the camera itself. 16Mb was terrabytes in terms of the "olden days"

I don't find card speed a problem with the DS as the buffer is reasonable in normal (family) usage.

It's significant on my otherwise excellent Rollei DR5100 (a Ricoh Caplio GX clone) where the write speeds are woefull and every little helps.

Thank you everyone who took the trouble to reply to my original post. In particular Tony Milner whose reply prompted me to do do some definitive tests of the relative writing speeds of the two cards which I quoted. I first took a photo with the Jessop bog standard card and recorded the time that the 'write light' on the camera was lit (9seconds), I then repeated the test with the Sandisk Ultra card and I got a time of (4 seconds). This would appear to coroborate what Tony said in his post. I am now convinced the faster cards are worth the the extra money paritcularly when shooting Raw.

The *st D can take advantage of the Lexar accelerated write speeds. It is well worth it to get a faster card.