Memory card for Canon 550d

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davholla

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Will I see any real difference in performance between 80/90/95mbs if I am shooting lots of raw photos? I.e. is worth paying extra?
 
Canon 550D user here shooting nothing but raw - my cards are 30 and 45 mbs................. Seem to work okay and until I just looked I wasn't aware they were two different speeds. So the answer may be 'no' but I'm sure there's a good reason for using a fast card.
 
The camera most likely has a maximum write speed lower than a fast card capabilities, which means a fast card probably won’t make much difference to the camera performance but would make transferring the images from the card to the computer faster (if you use a USB3 card reader directly on the computer rather than connecting the card via a cable). Another reason for buying faster cards than you currently need is futurproofing any future upgrades. Personally I’m not sure this really works as memory card design and performance is rapidly moving forward and getting cheaper as we go. Today’s 32 or 64GB cards were yesterday’s 8GB and 16GB cards. Memory card types move on too, many new faster cameras are moving over to XQD, C Fast and SD UHS-II which many recent models don’t use.

I’m not sure exactly what your cameras maximum write speed as the 550d is not listed on the website I use to check the memory card write speeds out:

https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com

As an example the canon 70D only gets 36.5MB/s with the fast Sandisk 95MB/s extreme pro SD card. Put that same card in the 7D2 and it’s now able to read at 74.9MB/s (ie the cards performance is limited by the 70D’s maximum write speed compared to the 7D2). I would guess the 550D is closer to the 70D write speed performance than it is to the 7D2. It’s not unusual for lower spec models or cameras not built for speed to be limited in this way as it makes them cheaper to manufacture and creates a model range too.
 
I would imagine that when the 550D was introduced card read/write speed wasn't too much of an issue as the high speed cards we have now weren't around (I got my 550D in late 2011 so it's pretty long in the tooth now). All I can find in the manual is a reference to the speed class for video, which is a minimum of class 6. My cards are class 10 and I would think it would be unusual now to buy a card less than class 10. I usually use a built in SD card reader to download my images and in my new pc it's very fast. Having said that, I use quite small cards so I'm not shooting 1000s of images on each card. Over 100 would be a very good trip. The raw files from the 550 are not exactly huge compared with the latest cameras. I haven't checked but the files from its latest incarnation, the 800D, will be significantly larger, and when (if) I convince myself to buy one for wildlife shooting I'll be buying it a new set of faster cards.
 
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