Ask the Teaboy

Q:How fast is fast enough?

A: Memory cards come in all sorts of shapes & sizes. Capacities vary wildly but the one question we get asked regularly is how fast a card do I need? You will notice that a lot of cards have either high speed or a number such as 45x or 133x etc written on them. These figures relate to the maximum speed at which data can be written to or read from the card, which if not sufficiently fast can create a bottleneck, slowing the performance of your camera. The standard which the number of "x" or "times" refers to is 150kbs = 1x, so 1.5mbs = 10x.

The key now is to determine how much speed is enough so you don't end up paying a premium for something you don't need. For the majority of compact cameras the most data intensive feature is the movie mode, where the cameras are often capable of 30 (albeit low res) frames per second, which will produce as much as 9 megabytes of data per second, justifying a 66x card.

For those lucky enough to have a pro SLR camera, 5 frames per second at 8 megapixels produces 20 megabytes of data per second, so the 133x cards are desirable. This of course doesn't mean a slower card won't work, it just won't allow you to fully realise the speed at which your camera can do things.

The last thing to note is it never hurts to have a little leeway, if the price difference isn't much (as it often isn't) then a faster card than you need right now can can offer a little more future proofing with regard to the imminent camera upgrade always looming.

Happy shooting.