Originally posted by stevebrot I am curious as to how you measure this. Would you care to give a step-by-step description?
Steve
I can't say exactly how he measured it, but the quick and dirty way is to set the camera to burst mode and time how long it takes to shoot about a hundred pictures without taking your finger off the trigger. Start a timer when you take your first shot and stop when the SD light stops blinking after you are finished. The first few seconds will be rapid as the buffer fills up, and then the camera will shoot at a slower rate, which is limited by how fast it can write to the card. After you take your finger off the shutter, it will continue to write to the SD card until the buffer is empty and the SD card access light will then stop blinking.
Then pop your memory card into a computer and see how much has been written to the card. Divide total MB by the time you measured and you'll have a rough measurement of how quickly the camera was writing to the card in MB/sec.
If you try this, do it on an empty SD card you just formatted. Flash memory writes in blocks, and as you fill the memory and delete pictures some blocks are only partially filled, which causes the card to read and write slower (even after you delete files) because flash memory has to read whole chunks even if they are only partly filled. When you format a memory card it should be back to full speed.