I have a Canon 70D. My thing is taking photos of children at play, I therefore need to take lots of photos in quick succession in an attempt to get a decent shot! I keep getting the word 'BUSY' and my camera won't shoot and I'm missing the moment! VERY frustrating!
I'm wondering if the problem is my memory cards? I currently have two cards:
San Disk Extreme, 60MB, 16GB (class 10)
Transcend, 45MB, 32GB (class 10)
Does a smaller storage equate to a slower write speed (I'm not so worried about read speed)? Does anyone have any advice?
@missalice No, the storage size itself has no correlation to the read/write speed. The higher the speed class (yours are class 10), the better performing the read/write speed. The speed class indicates the cards sustained transfer rate in megabytes per second. There aren't many cards below class 10 sold anymore.
Now, some memory cards (like the San Disk Extreme) support UHS and will have an additional UHS speed rating where the lowest rating of 1 indicates 10MB/s and goes up by 10 per rating (e.g. UHS Class 3 = 30MB/s). The SanDisk Extreme cards advertise a rate of 80MB/s, but this is the read speed and not the write speed. We're interested in the latter in the context of continuous shooting. On top of that the camera itself has to support UHS. I Googled your camera and the 70D supports UHS-I. With a SanDisk Extreme card (UHS Class 3) you should get about a 30-35MB/s write speed. This won't be fast enough to stay ahead of your camera's continuous shot buffer if shooting RAW, but you won't have to wait as long between bursts and so it should outperform your Transcend (unless it also is a Class 10 / UHS Class 3 - it should have a separate rating on the label if so). But if shooting small JPG the SanDisk Extreme just might barely keep up with the buffer? It would come down to the math of frames per second times file size compared to write speed per second. Hope that helps.
@dbj that's really helpful, thank you. The sandisk says U3, whereas the transcend says U1, so of the two I guess I should use the sandisk even though it has less memory.
I shoot on a Canon 6D and use SanDisks almost exclusively. I use the ExtremePro with a transfer rate of 95MB/s. I'm particularly happy with the 32 and 64MB chips. I can get a burst of about 28-30 shots before I have to stop and wait for the camera to catch up with me. I've never REALLY found this to be an issue. I only know the burst-rate duration bc I was pushing to find out; not bc I've ever maxed that when I was taking photos intentionally. I am most likely to have something move out of field (fast-moving objects) as I'm panning before I'm unable to capture in a steady burst.
Has the issue just started for you, or has it always been the case?
Your Canon 70D is advertised to be able to support a continuous shooting frame rate of 7 a second, the actual shutter speed has no bearing on the issue. It should have sufficient internal buffer space for you to be able to shoot at least 25 (even raw) frames with a Class 10 card until the camera will refuse to shoot more and be BUSY until it clears its buffers. Especially if the problem has just shown up, something has interfered with the data transfer and I'd get your camera store to look into it. Maybe the card has been corrupted? But if there is a problem with both of them I don't think it can be that. Is your camera under warranty still?
Other factors are involved--depends on your settings too. RAW drags the speed, and my 7D Mark II says 10 fps, but that's in JPEG. For things on the move, I sometimes switch to JPEG because it's too much to go over so many photos for RAW processing, but I'm lazy at times. Also, I found that if I'm in AUTO mode, the shutter speed lags and I'm not sure I get the busy note, but I'm likely to get that there more than with speed setting or with manual. Hope I'm helping. It's unlikely to really be your card in my mind. I use the extreme and pro extreme with relatively no noticeable difference.
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Now, some memory cards (like the San Disk Extreme) support UHS and will have an additional UHS speed rating where the lowest rating of 1 indicates 10MB/s and goes up by 10 per rating (e.g. UHS Class 3 = 30MB/s). The SanDisk Extreme cards advertise a rate of 80MB/s, but this is the read speed and not the write speed. We're interested in the latter in the context of continuous shooting. On top of that the camera itself has to support UHS. I Googled your camera and the 70D supports UHS-I. With a SanDisk Extreme card (UHS Class 3) you should get about a 30-35MB/s write speed. This won't be fast enough to stay ahead of your camera's continuous shot buffer if shooting RAW, but you won't have to wait as long between bursts and so it should outperform your Transcend (unless it also is a Class 10 / UHS Class 3 - it should have a separate rating on the label if so). But if shooting small JPG the SanDisk Extreme just might barely keep up with the buffer? It would come down to the math of frames per second times file size compared to write speed per second. Hope that helps.
I shoot on a Canon 6D and use SanDisks almost exclusively. I use the ExtremePro with a transfer rate of 95MB/s. I'm particularly happy with the 32 and 64MB chips. I can get a burst of about 28-30 shots before I have to stop and wait for the camera to catch up with me. I've never REALLY found this to be an issue. I only know the burst-rate duration bc I was pushing to find out; not bc I've ever maxed that when I was taking photos intentionally. I am most likely to have something move out of field (fast-moving objects) as I'm panning before I'm unable to capture in a steady burst.
Your Canon 70D is advertised to be able to support a continuous shooting frame rate of 7 a second, the actual shutter speed has no bearing on the issue. It should have sufficient internal buffer space for you to be able to shoot at least 25 (even raw) frames with a Class 10 card until the camera will refuse to shoot more and be BUSY until it clears its buffers. Especially if the problem has just shown up, something has interfered with the data transfer and I'd get your camera store to look into it. Maybe the card has been corrupted? But if there is a problem with both of them I don't think it can be that. Is your camera under warranty still?