G9 + new SD cards - slow

this has been an issue for me 2.  I have very fast Toshiba cards, and they seem to have a lag in reviewing pix )-;

Not that it matters now. I use Sandisk Extreme in my Sony and Sony SD in my Panasonic G9 which have two UHS-II slots

Good UHS II cards definitely have improved performance over for example UHS I Sandisk Extreme Pro 95MB/s - perceptible even when powering up the camera, and of course when reviewing images. Was actually surprised at the difference a good UHS II made. Figured may as well use the cards it needs for the times I may need to stretch the buffer.

JosephScha wrote:

I have a G9, not with the fastest cards but with Lexar UHS II cards (not the worst, either) and there is a perceptible lag when I press ">" to "play" recorded pictures. It doesn't seem to trouble me, but I have noticed it. Is that what you are talking about? I have a feeling it is only partly due to memory card speed. I wonder if someone with Sony G cards can confirm.

yes, that's it

For UK buyers I think the Adata V90 cards are well up there on the price performance ratio, and I couldn’t resist such a good offer as can be found if you look. The Sony tough cards seem the absolute quickest of those I have tried, quicker than the Sony G’s surprisingly.

I think for burst or 6K shooting a set of V90 cards is worth looking into to get the most from the G9.

I have been using Sandisk Extreme 64GB 90 MB/s XC-1 cards in all my M4/3 camera bodies with happy results.  But when I used them in the G9 I only found them “adequate” and although most of the time they were working fine - there were times when their slower performance was annoying.  Given that this was a case of put up with lesser speed performance as an occasional niggle or invest quite a lot of money in truly high performance cards it was something not obviously of high priority.  Especially when I checked the price of Sony G 64GB 300 MB/s XC-2 cards.

It was only when I saw a (relatively) good deal price on these cards after a slow-performance niggle and knowing that I had a serious bit of photographic need coming up that pushed me over the divide.

The Sony G XC-2 cards are obviously far better performaning cards - very quick and no-delay.  But if the need for ultra fast is not great it is not necessarily imperative to spend this sort of money if there is only a niggle or two involved.

As my Sandisk cards have always been more than fast enough for my purposes with other bodies I my pose the question that perhaps this slower-speed niggle is actually from buffering the dual card slots.  I see the dual card slots as something I don’t really need and it has somehow been pushed on to a pedestal of a “necessary” attribute of a truly “professioanal” camera body.  Why?  Is this just another new “video” camera feature pushed on to stills photographers or is it becoming a necessity to have such storage capacity because of high speed capture of stills.  It cannot be a “reliability” issue as Ihave never had a failed SD card.  And the stills photographer recording jpg + rw2 in single shot or short burst must have a huge capacity to do this with just one slot and a 64 GB card anyway.

My guess is that the necessary buffering of a pipeline to two possible SD card slots is actually slowing down the response rates of the SD cards and that we are now findiing it necessary to use the “brute force” of Sony G 300 MB/s XC-2 cards to get a similarly acceptable performance as Sandisk 80 MB/s XC-1 cards were giving on earlier camera bodies which only had one SD card slot.

Maybe it could be possible in firmware to lock the camera into using one slot only and to have to physically swap to the other slot when the first one fills up.  Therefore there should be quicker access - in theory.  But maybe a careful selection of the present options might help.  My selection is to use one slot for “everything” until it fills up and it is still niggly.  But the firmware on a read might monitor both slots and read both cards everytime playback is selected.  We could no know the actual firmware design used to support playback.

Maybe related... when I got the EM1.2 it came free with a 32GB Lexar UHS-2 300mbs. It was lightning fast. The camera did freeze a bit and then there was a firmware update and after that the card ran a lot slower but freezing went away. I have downloaded a formatting tool for SD cards that you run on a PC to low level format back to "factory" spec. I wonder whether the camera has "written" something to the card that slows it down? As I am paranoid about card reliability, I have not tried the formatting program. And as I always format a card anyways in the camera of use, any file that might slow it down will probably be written back again.