In LA

A friend of mine just bought a Canon SD550, which is a terrific little tiny digital camera that also shoots very acceptable high-resolution (640×480) digital video (at 30fps). He was considering the purchase of a 2Gb SD card for it since there was a very good price on that memory card, but it was a “standard” Sandisk SD card and he didn’t know if it would be fast enough to use for video recording.

I happen to have a video clip shot on a friend’s Canon Digital IXUS 50, which is the same as the Canon SD400 sold in the US and has the same 640×480 30fps video mode as the SD550. The clip is 1 minutes and 22 seconds in length and takes up 147.5Mb of disk space, which comes out to 1.8MB/s. It was not easy to find the write speeds of a Sandisk standard SD card on the net –they ought to be listed on the Sandisk site but are not. Eventually I came across this table, which lists a write speed of 981K/sec for a Sandisk standard 1Gb CF card. Assuming the 2Gb SD is similar to the 1Gb CF, it doesn’t seem like the card would be fast enough to record video on the SD550.

I wrote this up on the blog just in case someone else is trying to sort out this same issue, but what you see above is my guesswork. It should be much easier to find the answers to these questions. What SD memory card is fast enough to keep up with video recording on the Canon SD550? What is the minimum bitrate required. I’m surprised at how difficult it is to find this information. Sandisk should list the write and read speeds of their standard SD cards, not just the speeds of their faster cards, and Canon should specify the minimum speed card that is required for SD550 video.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.