Digital camera accessories

[Jerry_T]

I am thinking of buying the Pentax K100D
does any one know at which rate this camera can write onto the SD memory card
cards come at various rates ie
150x 133x 100x 80x etc
but i don't want to go to the extra cost of buying the latest 150x card
when the camera can only write at the rate offered by a 100x card
any one have any ideas

[bdery]

It seems (from www.dpreview.com) that the fastest operation the camera can do is file transfer, at 5,3 MB/s. So that would be your reference value, according to them. The camera doesn't seem to be very fast at writing on a card, again according to the review. The best thing you could do would probably be to contact Pentax and ask them about actual top writing speeds.

In any case, when picking a card, make sure you look at the difference between write and read speed. A card can be pretty fast at reading but slow in writing.

[Mike54]

I did a little checking this AM and found a thread on a Pentax user forum about the write speed being in the area of 10 MB/s and someone recommended the 80x card. One issue that was raised was that though the camera was limited by the buffer on how fast it would transfer to the card, a card reader may not have the same limitation.
In other words, even though having a fast card doesn't increase the performance of the camera it may work better with your card reader when it comes to transferring the images to the computer.
Bdery, did you notice that the review at dpreview showed/used a 133x card but failed to mention write speed anywhere in the review???  

[Deb]

You all might find this thread helpful discussing write speeds and Pentax cameras  .... http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00IiPT .

I haven't checked yet, but you might find card recommendations in the Pentax manual.

[bdery]

Bdery, did you notice that the review at dpreview showed/used a 133x card but failed to mention write speed anywhere in the review

Yes, I noticed that. Maybe with such a small buffer, they felt it wasn't an issue. Still, except for that aspect, it looks like a very, very interesting camera. Makes me want to know more about the newer K10D, too...

Anyway, for now it's going to be only my S2 and me!