Olympus C7070 Zoom Memory Card Write Speeds

Back to the Olympus 7070 online resource

Summary

This is a survey of the Olympus C7070 write speeds to different memory cards. It appears that the 7070 writes to the memory card at a faster speed than its predecessor (the 5060), topping out at 1.7-1.8 MB/s, which is a welcome improvement, but is still far less than what modern memory cards are capable of (10 MB/s).

Test procedure

The camera was set in manual focus mode, with a short shutter time, and the flash disabled.
The memory card to be tested was selected.
The card was formatted in the camera.
The camera was set to save RAW pictures (gives an Olympus Raw Format (.orf) file with a size of 10.2 MB).
Pictures were taken and the write times were measured manually with a stopwatch, starting immediately after the exposure (shutter sound) and ending when the "busy" red light went off.

Explanation of the tables

Card Type: CF=Compact Flash, xD=Extreme Digital
Brand and Model as written on the cards
Size in MegaBytes
Write speed: Measured as described above. It should be noted that a considerable "operator" dependent error is present in these measurements. The measurements may deviate by approximately ±0.5 second depending on exactly how the measurer interpreted the instructions for the tests.
Firmware: The firmware version of the camera used to do the test as determined from the EXIF data in a picture taken with the camera.

Any comments or questions can be mailed to me.

Results

Card type	Brand	Model	Size (MB)	Write time in seconds	Write speed (mb/s)
CF	Apacer	Standard model unmarked speed	512	6	1.7
xD	Olympus		32	12	0.85
xD	Olympus		32	11.5	0.9
CF	Sandisk	Ultra II	512	6.5	1.6
CF	Sandisk	Ultra II		5.5	1.85
CF	Apacer	Standard model unmarked speed	256	7.7	1.32
CF	Kingston	Standard model unmarked speed	128	11.7	0.9