Topic: Compact Flash for Digital Camera

[twoodruff]

My wife recently got a Nikon D70s. She wants a 4gb card, will a low cost one be okay or how fast does it need to be to handle the pictures?

[phanophish]

The low cost cards are just fine for most situations.  You MAY run in to limitations in taking a large number of shots in a small time period.  Such as shooting  burts of 5 or 8 images at peak action for sports.  I run a D70 and it really does not bother me for most situations.  When shooting raw I can pop off about 4 shots in a row, then begin to be limited by the CF/Microdrives speed.  Shooting Jpeg increases the number of shots that the buffer can handle even further  For casual shooting, say one image every 2-3 seconds, it will not matter at all.  If you plan to shoot lots of sports then a faster CF card may be worth the investment.  You might also find picking up a 4 GB card for most situations and a smaller fast card give you the capacity when you need it and the speed when that is important.

[BobW]

Each  "X" is 150 kBps
The big questions is what is the fastest the D70 can write ?
How big is the on-board buffer ?  4 RAW /12 jpg is what I've heard.

Here's a great resource for you:
http://www.photo.net/

From a Photo.net messageboard:
"The highest write speed that you can get for D70 is around 4.5 MB/sec,..." 
 (on my calculator that's 30X - be sure that is a continuous-write rating)

The card speeds rated usually are Read, then Write-Burst speed, lastly continuous Write, as it recording.
24/96 Stereo is 1.1 Mbps, if you care.   (about 8X continuous)

So a 40X should more than cover it, in theory.
See the Retail Space thread for a few bargains and reviews