How Necessary is UHS-II?

Given how expensive and scarce these UHS-II cards are, I'm wondering how necessary one would be on the X-T1, considering that cameras like the E-M1 shoot faster fps with larger buffers and get by fine with UHS-I.

Is there a tangible performance benefit in using UHS-II cards for the X-T1? Is it required to achieve the specified continuous shooting ratings?

If you look at it as a buffering issue - eventually, shooting 8 FPS in burst mode, the buffer could become full if the card can't write then fast enough.

Once the buffer is full the camera will back of the shooting rate.

So you can see how a slow card would eventually impact the burst speed, as the slowest part of the chain.

Until someone does some tests, no-one will know how far into a burst sequence that point might come. 4 frames, 8 frames, 16 frames?

At the moment the new SD cards seem to only have been released in Japan, and it's like going back 10 years looking at the memory prices! Ouch!!

Toshiba seem to be leading the charge - http://www.toshiba-memory.com/cms/en/products/sd-cards/exceria/exceria-pro.html

http://f-sunny.com
The future is just a click away...

Thanks, Chris.

It will be a steep price premium for sure... I just can't believe a 95 MB/s Extreme Pro could hold back this camera all that much.

Chris Dodkin said:

If you look at it as a buffering issue - eventually, shooting 8 FPS in burst mode, the buffer could become full if the card can't write then fast enough.

Once the buffer is full the camera will back of the shooting rate.

So you can see how a slow card would eventually impact the burst speed, as the slowest part of the chain.

Until someone does some tests, no-one will know how far into a burst sequence that point might come. 4 frames, 8 frames, 16 frames?

At the moment the new SD cards seem to only have been released in Japan, and it's like going back 10 years looking at the memory prices! Ouch!!

Toshiba seem to be leading the charge - http://www.toshiba-memory.com/cms/en/products/sd-cards/exceria/exceria-pro.html

http://f-sunny.com
The future is just a click away...

Click to expand...

Niche product? 8FPS I last had on my D2Hs, machine gun Kelly, used it a couple of times, in those couple of years I had that model, so maybe only a sales gimmick just in case you need it?

3x bursts of 8 images = 850 MB roughly written in what time? 3 seconds to free up the buffer? My uneducated guess would be that if you really needed THAT kind of speed, you wouldn't really be buying a Fuji X - or am I not seeing the future here?

I remember there was a guy on the Nikon D1/2 etc forum who used a D2Hs and he had a website with roughly 65.000 photos of his dog, now there's an application for you ...

Cheers

Deed

DDWD10 said:

Thanks, Chris.

It will be a steep price premium for sure... I just can't believe a 95 MB/s Extreme Pro could hold back this camera all that much.

Click to expand...

And that's the question - how much is that much?

Does it buffer and write ok up to 24 frames at 95 MB/s? in which case you might say that's fine for me. Or does it slow-down after 16 frames, and that might cause you an issue?

Will be interesting to see - something to ask Rico on Fuji X forum, as he's had the pre production camera for some time, and has been posting FLICKR sets of burst images demonstrating the AF tracking.

DDWD10 said:

Given how expensive and scarce these UHS-II cards are, I'm wondering how necessary one would be on the X-T1, considering that cameras like the E-M1 shoot faster fps with larger buffers and get by fine with UHS-I.

Is there a tangible performance benefit in using UHS-II cards for the X-T1? Is it required to achieve the specified continuous shooting ratings?

Click to expand...

I don't think the UHS-II will be required to achieve the ratings.

The perception is that a faster card will enable faster buffer clearing and increase the number of shots possible while shooting at the max fps. Or at least allow a faster recovery period.

If Fujifilm wants to dispel the perception that the X series cameras are slow (be it true or not), 'not for sport, children, etc.' then anything which speeds up the time for writing to card is good marketing. People are dazzled by big numbers.

Whether you or I or anyone else truly needs UHS-II may be another story, but some will.

If they put in larger buffers everyone buying the X-T1 is forced to have and pay for the capacity whether they want it or not. Allowing faster cards means that the cost is pushed onto only the users who choose to use it. For those who don't want it, they can save money with a slower card.

I suspect very slow cards may prove limiting in some circumstances but a reasonable speed, more moderately priced card should be sufficient, IMHO.

Machine gun shooting has never been my style but I did opt for a 16GB, 95MB/s card when I bought my X-M1. It cost me £32 so is hardly a significant cost against the price of the new camera.

"Despite using the same processor as the X-E2 and X100s, the X-T1 is compatible with UHS-II SD format cards and can shoot continuously at a maximum rate of 8fps (frames per second) for up to 47 Fine JPEG files or 23 simultaneous raw and JPEG files. Rather than stopping after the buffer becomes full, the X-T1 can still continue to shoot at 3fps until the card fills up."

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/ca...digital-slrs-hybrids/fuji-x-t1-1217506/review

That's a pretty generous buffer!

Chris Dodkin said:

DDWD10 said:

Thanks, Chris.

It will be a steep price premium for sure... I just can't believe a 95 MB/s Extreme Pro could hold back this camera all that much.

Click to expand...

And that's the question - how much is that much?

Does it buffer and write ok up to 24 frames at 95 MB/s? in which case you might say that's fine for me. Or does it slow-down after 16 frames, and that might cause you an issue?

Click to expand...

On my recent cameras, the camera begins writing buffered images to the card immediately, so sometime you can get more full speed shots than the camera can buffer, if you have a fast enough card. The real "problem" however in this case with a slow card is that though the camera can buffer over 20 raw images, if the camera can't write those images very quickly to the card, then as someone else said "it slows down to 3 fps". So, if Fuji raw files area bout 25MB each, and your card can write 95MB/second, then that is a bit over 3 fps. If however your card can write 200MB/second, then that is 8fps, or the full continuous frame rate for the X-T1. Now, this has to be tempered with whether the camera can really process and write 200MB/Second, but at least it becomes possible if the card is fast enough. As for the rated speed of UHS-II cards, It appears Toshiba is rating their cards at 240MB/second.

Just my thoughts, I hope this helps,

What is the availability of UHS-II cards in the US or Canada?

How does the file in the buffer get written to the card?

Does it get written one file at a time or multiple files at a time?

Reason I am asking is because if a single file is smaller than the maximum bandwidth available, it will not be able achieve full speed anyways.

For example, just because you have a 95MB/s card does not mean you get that speed when transfer files that has size of 30MB. You'll be getting a speed of 30MB/s only than, even if it is 10x 30MB file.... you can only achieve 30MB/s transfer speed.

But if multiple files can be transfered at same time than it'll be able to fully utilize it's maximum transfer speed, providing that multiple files to be transfered have total size over 95MB/s.

You can visually test this yourself on your PC. Copy a bunch of photo from your memory card to your PC and monitor the speed, you'll see that transfer speed is only as fast as size of file currently being transfered. If you use a program which does allow you to transfer multiple files at same time than you can fully utilize the maximum speed of available bandwidth. (Google TeraCopy, it can copy in multiple streams)

I am not sure how buffered files from camera is written to the memory card but since each photo is a its own file, using a faster card will help or not? I am not sure. Maybe it depends on I/O performance aswell.

This is my understanding of it.

xxgg said:

How does the file in the buffer get written to the card?

Does it get written one file at a time or multiple files at a time?

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There are two "major" factors involved in writing images to the card. 1. The cameras processor speed, and 2. The write speed of the card. As cameras images get larger, and camera processors get faster, the historical limit has been the card write speed. If the camera could write several large images to the card at the same time, and the card was infinitely fast, then there would be a benefit to writing multiple images at the same time. Unfortunately there are no cards that are fast enough to handle that level of data transfer, so I do not believe (this is my opinion) that any cameras attempt to write multiple images to the card at the same time. All images are written serially, one at a time. Another major reason that this will continue to be true as cards get faster, is that the amount of power required to run a camera processor fast enough to write multiple images to the card at the same time, would be prohibitive (again my opinion). In addition, I have found that putting a super fast card in an older camera doesn't really help either, because the processors in older cameras simply aren't fast enough to handle the data required to write to the card as fast as the card can handle it.

Just my thoughts,

sinbad said:

What is the availability of UHS-II cards in the US or Canada?

Click to expand...

Zip in the US as far as I can see so far - the only cards I've seen are in Japan