Nikon D90 – New SD Extreme III 30 MB/s Test
Well I received my Nikon D90 about 2 weeks ago now. I’ve had plenty of fun with it so far…and in my opinion, it shoots great quality pictures. I was aware that SanDisk had released a new 30 MB/s edition of their Extreme III SD card to go along with this camera. Well mine arrived yesterday and I thought I’d do a little test to get some real world numbers out of it.
I’ve chosen three SD cards for comparison:
1. SanDisk 4 Gb Extreme III 30 MB/s (Class 6) SD card
2. SanDisk 2 Gb Extreme III 20 MB/s (Class 6) SD card
3. SanDisk 4 Gb SDHC (Class 2) SD card
My test was shooting a simple well lit area of my desk in order to get max fps. All cards were inserted into the D90 then formatted before each test. With the camera set to manual (*Auto-ISO off and Active D-lighting on…I’ll get to that later), Continuous High or CH shutter mode, and JPEG Normal, I proceeded to fire off as many shots as possible before the camera buffer appeared to get full and began to slow down the camera’s ROF (rate of fire).
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My results, though not exact, give you an idea of where the performance lies in this new 30 MB/s card from SanDisk.
1. SanDisk 4 Gb Extreme III 30 MB/s (Class 6) SD card
Approx. 90-95 shots at 4.5fps (after that it slowed to about 3.5-4fps)
2. SanDisk 2 Gb Extreme III 20 MB/s (Class 6) SD card
Approx. 50 shots at 4.5fps (after that it slowed down to a steady 3-3.5fps)
3. SanDisk 4 Gb SDHC (Class 2) SD card
Approx. 15 shots at 4.5fps (after that it slowed down to a about 1.5-2fps)
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The card didn’t offer any kind of speed boost but merely ROF endurance at the camera’s fastest continuous speed.
The card did seem to have a slight quicker rate of review when going through pictures in the playback mode. Also the quick review after you take several continuous shots was quicker too, but nothing amazing. But there is one cool thing, let’s say you’ve shot several of continuous shots like 30-50 for some reason, the live review will keep showing you the latest picture that it has written to the card. It takes a long time to catch up and show the preview of the last in the series. Well if you hit the play button or the shutter half way, the quick review ceases. This allows the writing process to the card to finish as fast as possible. After that, just hit the play button again and you’re able to immediately flip through all of the photos you just shot…instantly. This would be very good for shooting sports, when you might need to check photos quickly then right away begin shooting again. Also, the speed when downloading from the camera to a computer using this new SanDisk Extreme III 30 MB/s SD card is incredibly quick compared to the others. I was able to download 500+ full size jpeg pictures in a 2-3 minutes.
So overall this card has some performance gains over a standard card and the normal Extreme III card in keeping the camera from filling up the buffer.
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(Updated 3-5-09) *Now about the Auto-ISO issue. If Auto-ISO is enabled, and then activated by the camera** this can indirectly inhibit the camera’s ability to buffer. Also these other settings, pulled from the Nikon D90 manual, can cause the same effect…
• ISO is set to H 0.3 or higher
• High ISO NR is on and the ISO is set to 800 or higher
• If long exposure noise reduction is on
• Active D-lighting is on.
Here is the buffer size chart from the Nikon D90 manual…
**Auto-ISO: If the image being metered is going to be underexposed and the shutter speed has to drop below the minimum shutter speed parameter in the ISO sensitivity settings to achieve a proper exposure, only then will the camera force a change in the ISO settings from where you have it set at (i.e. ISO 200) – See below…
With the above settings, only when the camera’s shutter speed drops below 1/30th will the camera adjust the ISO above 200, but it will not exceed 1600.
Just the review I was looking for. Thanks. Although still unsure if it is worth the extra money.
Hi Kevin,
Does the 30MB/s have any impact on the video?
Hi Kevin,
Does the 30MB/s have any significant impact to the D90′s video mode?
Hi Johannes,
From what I know, the only thing that will improve on the D90′s video mode is speed in which a movie file is downloaded from the card to the computer. The D90 will still be limited to 5 min of record time and the quality and raster of the video will also remain unchanged.