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How fast a card should I get for my dSLR?

I couldn't find a scientific answer to this one. Funnily enough I couldn't even find online how fast the D40 writes out its data. Perhaps its in the manual and I should just look. And what's with all these different speed metrics for SD cards !?

Anyway, here's how I went about it. From yesterday's shoot I have 101 pictures totaling 204.6 MB (Large Fine Jpegs. I ain't no RAWer) = 2Mb/picture

The D40 can shoot bursts of 2.5 frames a second = 5Mb/s. If we are to keep up with that we should have a card that is capable of at least 5Mb/s write speed.

Thanks to wikipedia's page on SD cards, we learn that class 6 SDHC cards write at 6 MB/s and above and the 'x' notation e.g. 40x, 50x means 40x150kB/s.

So we will need a class 6 card doing 5MB/s or more or a 33x card.

Lets see how that works out for an amateur shooting like 10 pictures or so at a go.

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