Should I get a faster SD card for Nikon D40?

Question

I had kingston 2gb sd card, is it worth to upgrade to a expesive sd card? will it be major chance? i know cf does matter what about sd?

Answer 1

If you can put your D40 in continuous shooting mode and shoot at a constant 2.5 frames per second untill the memory card fills up, your camera will gain absolutely nothing from a faster memory card.
I use a D200 with prety fast cards. With me, things start to get sluggish after about 25 pictures in continous mode... that's the point where the camera's built-in buffer fills up and it can't write information to the memory card fast enough. This is where having an even faster memory card helps. But since I rarely shoot more than about 8 shots in continous mode anyway, I never run into this limitation. Also, the the D200 shoots at 5 fps instead of 2.5, and with 10 megapixels instad of 6. (So a D200 sends information to the memory card at over double the speed of a D40.) My guess is that the D40 will do fine with just about any memory card.
A different reason to upgrade your memory card, would be to speed up the transfer time of a full card to your computer. You might shave off 20 seconds. Unless you're a professional photojournalist and every second counts, that too would not be worth the extra investment.

Answer 2

Depends. The mininum speed is less than what the camera can produce in data if you keep the shutter pressed. Continuously i estimate that you can take about one shot per second with that card, perhaps one and a half. That also depends on whether you shoot jpg or raw of course. Overall i think it will do good enough. After all, how often does one use the maximal possible continous shooting speed for several seconds?

Answer 3

I use SanDisc Extreme III cards for my wife's Fuji S5000 (SD) and my Canon XTi (CF). Check out SanDisc.com for some very impressive demos.