Panasonic FZ20 and faster SD card?

Does anyone know if the Panasonic FZ20 can take advantage of the faster SD
cards such as the SanDisk Ultra II series? The manual doesn't mention
this, but Steve's Digicams did test with the faster card, so it is at
least compatible.

Thanks,
David

 

The differnce in write speeds between an normal Lexar/SanDisk card and
an Ultra II card were quite noticeable when taking pictures in TIFF
format so I'd have to say that it DOES make a difference with the FZ20.

Now, on the other hand, I have no idea if the FZ20 can max-out the write
speed on an Ultra II card, I just know an Ultra II card is noticeably
faster than "normal" cards.

"How much faster?" Don't know... After a few test shots I just stopped
trying to take TIFF pictures on normal cards so I don't recall exactly
how long a normal card takes. I'd guess an an Ultra II card is at least
3x or 4x faster, but I haven't done any stopwatch timing so it may be
faster than that...

... Joe

 

Thanks, Joe.

Was there any noticeable difference using JPEGs rather than TIFFs?

Cheers,
David

 

Well, yes. Now that you mention it, I DID notice a few differences...
The JPG files were a LOT smaller, and they took a LOT less time to write
to the card, and they had a tiny amount of "artifacting" on a couple of
pictures (a REALLY tiny amount), and they had a different file extension
and ....

Er..
What kind of "difference" were you really wanting to know about? :^)

... Joe

 

Joe wrote:
[]

Whether the camera worked noticeably faster when using SD Ultra II cards
with JPEG images. I appreciate that TIFF files (which are much larger)
will show a speed difference, but if you are using the smaller JPEG files
do you also see a noticeable speed benefit from the faster SD cards?

Thanks,
David