big SDHC cards...

Anyone used Kingston Class 10 SDHCs (32GB) in a K5 yet? I'm looking for a couple of 16 or 32GB cards and these are reasonably cheap and a *lot* cheaper than the sandisks.

Experiences, please!

Bret

I use the Transcend 16GB Class 10 SDHC Card and I know that quite a few people have a problem with the card but I have to say that in one year I had no problem with the *GB or 16GB one at all.
There are a lot of fakes about of this make and this gives it a bad name but TBH I and a few others I know that use them have never had any problems with them.
For the price it may just be worth wile of trying one out.
I even will get an SDXC 64GB Class 10 of them when they are back in stock as they are over £100 cheaper but if I get the same result as from the SDHC cards I will have no problem.
Just a thought.

I've been looking at these as well as I'm after a faster card for use in the K-5 when using the faster FPS rate as an alternative to the Sandisk Extreme and Lexar 133X Professional. Has anyone got any ideas?

Rob

the Extremes are about as fast as they get (at least the 30MB/s versions). Tom's Hardware has a review about them and these two are top of the pile.

Most of the Class 10 cards appear to do pretty well, but some better than others.

Bret

I bought a 32Gb card for my KX just recently, do I need to do a firmware update to have the camera see the whole capacity? I must admit I'm a bit hazy on the exact numbers, but I remember thinking that it should store more than it says it will. The release notes for the firmware update only mention SDXC cards, so I don't think it will make any difference. Or would it be generally good to update it? I am in the "if it ain't broke" camp usually with thise things.

no, it's a "31.5GB" in real life card, like everything else.

Bret

Sorry, that's not what I meant. I was looking at the number of available photos on the LCD display, and though I don't recall the numbers, I was expecting the move from a 4Gb card to 32Gb card to give me roughly 8x the number of available photos. Before I go any further I guess I need to put the two cards in and check I'm not imagining things.

I've been in computers since 1982 and been through the old "when is a megabyte not a megabyte" thing.

No, it's me. I had in mind that the old card showed capacity for 400-odd images, when in fact it's 149 in 4Gb, and the new one is 1150-odd, which is about right, roughly 8x the smaller card. I think I'm getting the 400-odd from my compact.

Unfortunately using the "class" system doesn't really help - it'a another one of those industry standards that's a bit too vague as it only refers to the minimum speed of the card.

Class 10 = 10mb/s minimum

sandisk extreme sdhc are 30mb/s whereas some cheaper alternative, whilst still class 10, are only 10mb/s - a big difference.

You need to check the exact speed of each card to get a meaningful comparision. Another thing to consider when buying a 32gb card is a lot of photos are going to get lost if it fails so it's well worth making sure you buy a decent quality card - alternatively I prefer to buy several smaller ones

Simon

Actually it is 29.8GiB this is caused by the industry using base 10 rather than binary when giving the size so it will always be wrong.

1000x1000x1000 vs 1024x1024x1024

1000000000 vs 1,073,741,824

That is quite a loss of space.

The Class system is no good as Sandisk Extreme cards can only be rated at class 10 maximum even though they should be class 20-45 depending on the model.

You need to know a lot more than the class to get any good information about a card.

Since I've got two cards I just did some informal timings.

Writing a 1.41 GB folder of raw files from the laptop to the card:

Sandisk Extreme III 4GB: 127 sec, so 11.36 MB/sec
Transcend 16GB class 10: 181 sec, so 8 MB/sec

Reading the same data back to the laptop (and deleting, since I used 'cut'):

Sandisk: 19.7 MB/sec
Transcend: 19.7 MB/sec - a draw.

The Sandisk I tested above is 4GB, but the Amazon price of the Extreme III 16GB is 99 quid, against the 17.09 I paid for the Transcend 16GB card...

I've now put the Transcend in the grip as the spare and put the Sandisk back in the camera.

Remember you will also be limited by the USB port and card reader. Bursts will also be faster than continuous write speeds. If you did one file to the extreme III you'd probably see it closer to 25MB/s

... large files are also faster than smaller ones. I've been moving a lot of files recently and large ISOs are really quick, whereas 2MB files are not.

Bret