Two card slots on my em1 mk III

[Jonrow]

I've just gone through (on this forum) a monumental process about jpegs. tiffs etc. etc.

Which has led me to think about the 2 card slots. Is there any reason they could be useful? I only ever use no. 1, and I believe that no. 2 is not quite as good? How do people who use them get something out of them. I could allocate no. 1 to raws (orfs) and no. 2 to jpegs. Then maybe, I could export the raws straight to Lightroom from camera or card?

 

[bobnn]

If nothing else, you can configure both of the cards to record everything (except video, I think), so that you have redundancy if case a card fails or becomes corrupted. That's rare, but not unheard of.

The first slot is UHS II capable, so putting a faster card in slot 1 and sending raws to slot 1 and jpegs to slot 2 might improve performance. I haven't tried that and probably won't, I save everything I can to both cards.

I'm not sure that importing from anything other than an internal drive is a good idea for the Lightroom database - it might be perfectly ok I'm just not sure. I know that darktable and rawtherapee, by default, save the sidecar files (which contain the edit information) in the place you import raws from so I definitely wouldn't use the SD cards for that, at least not without further investigation/configuration.

Have fun with your e-m1.3!

 

[Sam Bennett]

If nothing else, you can configure both of the cards to record everything (except video, I think), so that you have redundancy if case a card fails or becomes corrupted. That's rare, but not unheard of.

It’s happened to me, so this is exactly how I use mine. It’s a backup. This can also save your bacon if you delete photos as you go - you’re only deleting off the card you’re viewing from. So if you make a mistake, you can still pull the file off the second card.

The first slot is UHS II capable, so putting a faster card in slot 1 and sending raws to slot 1 and jpegs to slot 2 might improve performance. I haven't tried that and probably won't, I save everything I can to both cards.

I'm not sure that importing from anything other than an internal drive is a good idea for the Lightroom database - it might be perfectly ok I'm just not sure. I know that darktable and rawtherapee, by default, save the sidecar files (which contain the edit information) in the place you import raws from so I definitely wouldn't use the SD cards for that, at least not without further investigation/configuration.

Have fun with your e-m1.3!

 

[Woody Meristem]

For as long as I've had camera with two card slots I've recorded all my photos to both cards. Earlier I'd had a card go bad during an important shoot and swore I'd never go through that again if it could be avoided -- two card slots solves that problem.

 

[CharlesB58]

I used to save RAW to card one and .jpeg to card 2. After an issue downloading some images, I now use slot 2 as a backup.

 

[drj3]

I just have the camera set so that it switches to slot 2 when slot 1 card is full. I shoot high frame rate bursts that may have two or three hundred images in the burst. I don't need to worry about the camera stopping because a card is full.

 

[number_5]

The e-m1.3 has two card slots, but one is UHS-II and the other is UHS-I. It might not be ideal to write to both slots at the same time because the UHS-I might slow down UHS-II speed, assuming you have a UHS-II card in slot 1.

 

[Art_P]

I usually have slot 2 assigned video and backup to slot one (if the first card is filled or develops an error) It's also handy for those times I've forgotten to put a card back after uploading, or the write protect tab moved and disabled the card.

For critical work, one might have the camera save to both cards as a backup.

Yes, saving the JPGs to #2gives you quick access for posting, while keeping the RAW for more refined processing.

Or maybe leave the laptop home, edit images in camera and save the results to card 2

 

[Dick Barbour]

Well, my 2 slots on the G9 have saved my bacon several times. The older I get the more forgetful I get, to the extent that I can forget to take the card reader out of the PC after uploading photos. The next time I go to take a shot, instead of a "no card" message it just takes it into slot #2 and I don't know the difference until later.

****

 

[Michael Meissner]

I've just gone through (on this forum) a monumental process about jpegs. tiffs etc. etc.

Which has led me to think about the 2 card slots. Is there any reason they could be useful? I only ever use no. 1, and I believe that no. 2 is not quite as good? How do people who use them get something out of them. I could allocate no. 1 to raws (orfs) and no. 2 to jpegs. Then maybe, I could export the raws straight to Lightroom from camera or card?

There are various things you can do.

• What I do is set to record to slot #1 and if it gets full, switch over to slot #2. Now since I I shoot with 128GB cards, and since I normally don't do high speed machine gun shooting or shoot 4K/C4K videos, I've never run out of space. The one time I filled 1/2 of the card, I had switched to silent shutter on my OM-1, and I didn't realize there was a separate menu item for frame rate for silent shutter, and instead of shooting at 3fps, I was shooting at 20fps.
• If you remove the card to upload your photos, having the 2nd card can mean you can still take pictures if you forgot to replace the first card. I recall a tip from somebody that said when you take the card out of the camera to upload it, leave the card door open to remind you to put the card back.
• If you are worried about card failure, and you are shooting still photos, you can set the camera to copy stills to both cards. Unfortunately, shooting video doesn't have this option. I've heard some pros do this for stills.
• As you said, you can set it up to copy JPG files to one card and RAW files to another.
• One other thing is if you go on a long trip without a laptop, you can use the second slot to make backups. There is a menu option to copy the contents from one card to another. Note if you care, the sequence number in the file name is bumped up by this copying. So if you do this, get a bunch of slow/cheap (i.e. V30) cards, and just do a backup copy each night, and store these backup cards in a different location than your camera, such as your checked luggage. I can imagine if you are really worried about losing gear, you could physically mail the backup cards to your home, and even if you loose all luggage, you would still have the backups you made before doomsday strikes.
• During photo review you can copy an individual photo or video to the other copy. So you could establish a best hits version on your second card.
• The last option is just don't bother using the second slot.

As you said, in the E-m1 mark II/III, the first card slot can handle the high speed cards (i.e. UHS-2 V90) while the second slot is limited to slower speeds (i.e. UHS-1 V30). But generally unless you are shooting in machine gun style or shooting long videos, UHS-1 V30 speeds are fine. I suspect that even C4K/4K videos probably don't need V90 speed cards, and probably are fine with just V60 cards.

On my OM-1, both card slots are high speed, so I have a UHS-II V90 card in the first slot and a UHS-II V60 card in the second slot.

Since my E-m1 mark II is mostly retired at this point, I put a UHS-II V60 in the first slot, and one of the older UHS-I V30 cards in the second slot, since it won't be able to drive the card at high speed.

 

[Michael Meissner]

The e-m1.3 has two card slots, but one is UHS-II and the other is UHS-I. It might not be ideal to write to both slots at the same time because the UHS-I might slow down UHS-II speed, assuming you have a UHS-II card in slot 1.

Yep, that is a trade off. I can see reasons for either choice. But like any trade off, it is nice to have the option.

 

[bobnn]

If nothing else, you can configure both of the cards to record everything (except video, I think), so that you have redundancy if case a card fails or becomes corrupted. That's rare, but not unheard of.

It’s happened to me, so this is exactly how I use mine. It’s a backup. This can also save your bacon if you delete photos as you go - you’re only deleting off the card you’re viewing from. So if you make a mistake, you can still pull the file off the second card.

I never delete as I go, it's more than I can handle to just get the shots. But that's because I often shoot with time constraints.

 

[tomhongkong]

I have a 32GB V90 in slot 1 and a 128GB v90 in slot 2. I write the same images to both cards. I normally process from the 32GB card and reformat after downloading, as it is quicker to load images to DXO than having to weigh through everything on a big card. Periodically I copy the big card to my card back up drive on PC. If anything happened to the 32 GB card, I forgot to replace it, it overflowed or crashed I have the image on the big card.

I think this seems to be the way most people use the slots as described in this thread. Incidentally you need fast cards in both slots or you slow the whole write process in camera.

 

[David5833]

I normally set the second card to record when the first is full. I normally shoot raw and extremely rarely fill the first card. However, on rare occasions I want to also record jpeg so then I set one to record raw and the other jpeg.

I've never written the same file to two cards, but I might if I was making a living from photography.