My Compact Flash card the limiting factor?

I have a Canon EOS 400D and use 2 Kingston 1GB Compact Flash cards. I don't fell I get quite the burst speed I should get with the camera. Do you think these standard (orange top) Kingston 1GB cards are fast enough or should I invest in something faster?

I see it is rated at 3.7MB/S, I am thinking of getting a 4GB Kingston Elite Pro for £54 (8MB/S) is this going to be fast enough?

The alternatives are:

4GB Kingston Ultimate (18MB/s) : £117
4GB Lexas (20MB/s) : £135
Sandisk Extreme III (20MB/s) : £92
Sandisk Extreme IV (40MB/s) : £168
Sandisk Ultra 3 (9MB/s) : £72

How many MB/S is needed?

A faster card will help up to a point. Every camera has a built-in buffer and how the maker (Canon in your case) has utilised that buffer is the limiting factor in the number of shots you can get in one burst. If you shoot RAW then it is a hard limit with your camera getting up to 11 shots and if you shoot JPEG you will get about 30ish in one burst at 3 frames per second. Something to keep in mind is that in order to get 3 frames a second you have to have the shutter fast enough to allow it, my particular camera shoots at 5 frames per second and that means I need a shutter speed of at least 1/250 of a second. All of the above is built into your camera and your memory card will not effect the 3 frames per second rate or the number of shots you can capture in a burst as they are all saved to the internal buffer memory. The faster memory cards will help after the buffer is filled however, obviously the faster the card the faster your camera can clear its buffer and be ready to accept more shots which it will then place back into the buffer. Unless you often go over 10/11 RAW or 30/31 JPEG shots when shooting in burst mode the faster memory cards will not help you much. Where pro's and advanced users will see a lot of benefit from faster cards is when they are downloading hundreds of images to their Mac's/pc's as a much faster card can shave many minutes off that downloading process. Faster cards are great and not much more expensive these days, but don't go overboard buying or worse still replacing your current cards with the fastest available as your camera isn't going to notice much difference (some high end camera's will notice a difference though as the buffer can clear fast enough with high speed cards so that the photographer can continuously shoot at 5 or 8 frames per second until the card is full). I hope this ridiculously long answer (sorry about that) helps a little... Personally I use SanDisk Ultra II or Extreme III cards and have recently bought a MyMemory 133X card I am happy with as it is on sale at mymemory.co.uk

Sandisk Ultra 3? is there such a card?

At any rate, it's highly unlikely that the 400D is any faster then 9MB/sec... therefore anything faster then 9MB/second will be unused by the camera itself... In fact it's probably more like 6 or 7MB/second tops, but I've not seen any good data on this...

Howver, you can use card speed in card readers and/or in portable storage devices... so speed in the camera is not nessasarly the only thing to consider...

Chris Padfield said:

I see it is rated at 3.7MB/S, I am thinking of getting a 4GB
Kingston Elite Pro for £54 (8MB/S) is this going to be fast enough?

The alternatives are:

4GB Kingston Ultimate (18MB/s) : £117
4GB Lexas (20MB/s) : £135
Sandisk Extreme III (20MB/s) : £92
Sandisk Extreme IV (40MB/s) : £168
Sandisk Ultra 3 (9MB/s) : £72

How many MB/S is needed?

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