UHS-I SD cards

Hello,

I am looking to buy a new SD card but I am not sure which speed to
buy. Can a camera cope with any speed card or does the camera have a
limit to how fast it can write? For example, I see you can buy 600
speed cards but say the camera can only write at 400 speed, then it
would not make sense to spend extra money on a 600 speed card.

I see that the faster cards are UHS-I cards. I hadn't heard of this
before, so looked it up on wikipeia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHS-I#UHS_Speed_Class

It says "UHS memory cards work best with UHS host devices". What if my
camera is not a UHS device? Would it work slower than the advertised
speed in that instance? There doesn't seem any point buying a 600x UHS
card if a non-UHS camera will only write at say 400x.

I'm thinking of buying the new canon powershot 260sx hs. I have had a
read of canon's web site but I can't find anything about whether their
cameras support UHS, only a faq saying to use class 6 or higher.

Should I buy the fastest card I can afford or do these speeds become
meaningless after a certain rate?

Thanks,
Stephen.

 

Any card will work at any speed within its design limits.

However the limitation comes when you want to use continuous
shutter or (particularly) video. For those your card has to match
or be better than the camera's needs. I have a Sony HX5V for
which it is recommended I use 4x speed SDHC cards, shown by a
figure 4 partially inside a diamond outline on the card label. In
fact I use 6x and 10x cards (they are more commonly available)
and it works perfectly. If I use SD cards then I can take
'ordinary' pictures but will have problems with video and/or
continuous shooting - the camera will stop working when its
internal buffer memory is full.

Most important is whether your camera can use SDHC cards or you
are limited to SD only. A camera that uses SDHC can also use SD
but not vice versa. SD cards are of smaller capacity and are
slower than SDHC in the main.

If you are unsure Google your camera and you will be able to
discover your options quite easily.

 

Cameras have a write speed limit, which should be in the manual
somewhere. Cards also have a write (and read) speed limit. The speed
of the whole system will be the slowest of the two write limits.

There have been 4 different revisions of the "SD card" standards - the
original SD card supporting up to 2GB, the SDHC, supporting 4-32GB and
faster speeds, SDXC for more than 32GB, and even higher speeds, and UHS,
which I don't know much about.

Older cameras generally won't work with newer cards, or will only "see"
part of the memory capacity, but you can usually use older cards in new
cameras. Some old cameras can have their firmware upgraded to work with
newer cards.

Only a few cameras currently support UHS. If it doesn't explicitly say
it does, it probably doesn't.

There's not a lot of point in having a card faster than your camera can
write to, unless you're expecting to get a faster camera soon, or have
a fast card reader to upload your pictures to your computer.

 

Exactly. Canon say the SX260 HS takes SD, SDHC, SDXC cards.

If you take stills, class 6 or class 10 SDHC cards are readily available
and (if you shop around) cheap. If you want to take long movies, the
64Gb SDXC card at £33 on Amazon looks like a lot of capacity for your
money.