Write times an issue?

MCTuomey

MCTuomey

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Anyone frustrated with slow write times for their R-D1/D1s? Or put another way, do you feel any limitation in your shooting style that results from buffer performance? I'm new to the camera and find myself waiting for file transfer between shots. Not accustomed to the longish time, I'm wondering about others' experience.
 
To date I've never had the camera lag behind me. I shoot in raw and use Sandisk Extreme III cards. I suppose it's just the way I shoot with it. I tend to be quite deliberate with it.

More often than not what slows me down is forgetting to cock the shutter on the first shot :) - after that I'm fine and in the swing of things.

What situations do you find it slow? And what is the buffer? 3 shots? I've never checked.

John
 
Johnmcd said:
To date I've never had the camera lag behind me. I shoot in raw and use Sandisk Extreme III cards. I suppose it's just the way I shoot with it. I tend to be quite deliberate with it.

More often than not what slows me down is forgetting to cock the shutter on the first shot :) - after that I'm fine and in the swing of things.

What situations do you find it slow? And what is the buffer? 3 shots? I've never checked.

John
Click to expand...

I agree with John, the time to cock the shutter is usually the main limitation and not the raw buffer filling up. It must have happened to me only a couple of times. I believe it is in inherent to street photography as many times you have only one quick chance to get the shot you see. Therefore this shot will be gone far before your buffer fills up, your limitation being the time to cock the shutter.
As for other pictures (landscapes...), I will take time to compose so speed does not matter.
 
I bump up against the buffer all the time. I have heard that you can shoot in continuously with JPEG, but I only shoot RAW. Sometimes filling the buffer forces me to reflect on what I am shooting and gets me to slow down.
 
Last time i measured it, my R-D1 allowed for shooting 3 raw pics with no lag at all if i didn't wait more than half a second between each shot roughly.
Otherwise it's about a 5 seconds wait between each shot.
Also the time for the buffer to fill up after 3 frames is about 10 seconds with a fast card.
Just a matter of being used to that i guess, but if it comes after the third shot you will loose the decisive moment i'm afraid.
 
I usually put the camera to my eye shoot and the camera is ready ahead of me before the next shot.I always shoot raw with both eyes open so its pretty easy to know when to press the shutter.I don't use the RD-1 any different to the way I use a film rangefinder.

Regards
Steve
 
john, i mostly run up against the buffer when i'm trying to shoot quick portrait "takes." meaning, a fairly quick bracketing to cover blinking, etc. this is an in-grained habit, i'm afraid, so it happens often. since i prefer to shoot raw, it's a bit of a problem. my experience is what LCT describes - if i don't shoot really rapidly, i suffer the buffer ...

thanks for giving me some insight, everyone. i need to slow down, i think ...
 
I just did a quick test.

I was able to shot continuously for 6 shots at about a shot per sec. On the 7th it hesitated then the shutter went off on second press, a split sec later. The same with the 8th shot. If I waited two seconds I was back to 1 frame per sec and so on.

I imagine that the faster the card you have the quicker it could flush the buffer. 3 frames is the max when firing as fast as you can but a steady 1 frame per second is pretty much achievable with a fast card at least up to 6 shots and back then in the game after a slight pause.

What cards are you using Mike?

Cheers,

John
 
All this would depend on whether the R-D1 can actually make use of the faster speed cards or whether the R-D1 is the actual bottleneck.

John
 
I think the number of successive shots is an inherent function of the R-D1's buffer, not the speed of the card. I have never noticed any difference between fast or slow cards. What I find is that when shooting raw, I can fire off 3 shots as fast as I can cock the shutter, and then the buffer is full and you have to wait for it to write at least one shot to the card before you can fire again. I think you can fire alot more jpegs before the buffer fills, but when shooting fast moving scenes, like theater, I can even fill the buffer with jpegs on occasion. Yes, it is annoying when that 4th shot is the one you really wanted, but such is life. You just have to slow down if you don't want to out race the camera.

/T
 
LCT said:
Last time i measured it, my R-D1 allowed for shooting 3 raw pics with no lag at all if i didn't wait more than half a second between each shot roughly.
Otherwise it's about a 5 seconds wait between each shot.
Also the time for the buffer to fill up after 3 frames is about 10 seconds with a fast card.
Just a matter of being used to that i guess, but if it comes after the third shot you will loose the decisive moment i'm afraid.
Click to expand...
Just checked with another body (R-D1s).
Same results as above.
 
LCT said:
... or to get a special tempo: 3 shots, breathe & recompose, 3 shots, breathe & recompose, and so on.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, on which subjects do you think we would we need more than 3 consecutive shots ? I would understand with sports, but than you would probably get a DSLR instead of a rangefinder. But on the typical rangefinder subjects, I never find myself too bothered by the raw lag. Moreover since I try not to influence the scene with my intervention : franticly cocking the shutter gets you spotted pretty fast. Maybe it is all down to shooting style, but would like to know how you guys do shoot?
 
i shoot differently depending on the subject. i don't have one style, as far as i can tell. static subject, pretty slow. dynamic subject or scene, frame rate goes up. it just depends on what's going on. i tend to bracket compositionally, so that drives the frame rate up at times. unfortunately, i don't always bracket in perfectly timed trills ...

my other digi gear is very fast and my film RF is as fast as my dexterity can manage (I'm the weak link there). not so with the R-D1. as yanidel says, it's down to shooting method, so i need to adapt to the camera, i think.
 
Yes, for me, the biggest annoyance on the RD1 was the write time.
Next came the manual frame adjust, when I started using a tri-Elmar.
Then, oddly enough, came the manual advance.
Finally sold it when I bought an M8.

...Vick
 
yanidel said:
Out of curiosity, on which subjects do you think we would we need more than 3 consecutive shots ?...
Click to expand...
I was just suggesting that 3 consecutive shots are the limit in raw and that shooting fast is mandatory for this purpose. It doesn't bother me that much after 3 years use but i have missed some pics due to the small buffer that's for sure.
 
yanidel said:
Out of curiosity, on which subjects do you think we would we need more than 3 consecutive shots ? I would understand with sports, but than you would probably get a DSLR instead of a rangefinder. But on the typical rangefinder subjects, I never find myself too bothered by the raw lag. Moreover since I try not to influence the scene with my intervention : franticly cocking the shutter gets you spotted pretty fast. Maybe it is all down to shooting style, but would like to know how you guys do shoot?
Click to expand...

I frequently run out of buffer doing theater shooting and baby shooting. All fast changing subjects.

/T
 
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