SDHC Cards - Class 6 vs. Class 10

L Train

L Train

Active member
I just got my HMC150 and I'm a little unsure about which card I should get. I got it used and it came with a class 6 card. Can it take a class 10 card and is it worth the extra money to get this?

I know it writes to the card faster but do I need that??
 
The HMC150 is perfectly happy with Class 4 cards. Strictly speaking, any faster would be overkill, as the HMC150 itself would be unable to take advantage of the faster speeds. You might still want to get Class 6 or Class 10 cards if you planned on using those cards with future cameras that might take advantage of the faster speeds, and it's possible that Class 6 or 10 cards would offload faster to your computer. But if you're looking for the maximum performance with your HMC150, Class 10 won't give you any better video performance than Class 4 would on that camera.
 
Phil1076 said:
If you are going to use a Class 10, make sure the camera''s firmware is at 1.21.
Click to expand...
Excellent point, yes. The HMC150 was released to the market before Class 10 cards existed. So if you have an earlier model with the original firmware, it won't be able to use a Class 10 card. Update to the latest firmware in order to use Class 10 cards on those models. More recently-bought HMC150s will have the appropriate firmware already installed.
 
Thanks for the great answers! I was told my camera has the updated firmware, but I'll probably still stay away from the Class 10 cards to save a few bucks.

Thanks again!

- Logan
 
Suffering through hundreds of hours of video with class 6, I would go with class 10 now. If you are shooting a lot of footage it will save you time on off loading, 6MBs vs 10MBs. If time is abundant don't worry about the class 10.

That being said I am interested in how USB 3.0 and a 3.0 SDHC reader would play with both of these cards, 480mbs vs 5gbs. Then again you will sill be limited by the card and card readers read speed.
 
Note -- there's no guarantee that a Class 10 card will offload faster than a Class 6 card. There's a reasonable expectation that it will, of course, but no guarantee. The SDHC speed classifications only refer to the minimum WRITE speed, and don't specify anything about read speeds.

Just laying it out there, because it's entirely possible that some manufacturer could design a Class 4 card that would have higher read speeds than some other manufacturer's Clas 10 card. I don't know if that has ever happened, but it could.

I'd love to get a USB3 SDXC reader, I don't think they're on the market yet. Some company announced that they'd have one available next month, so soon I hope to find out.
 
Barry_Green said:
I'd love to get a USB3 SDXC reader, I don't think they're on the market yet. Some company announced that they'd have one available next month, so soon I hope to find out.
Click to expand...

This would be something I'd be keen to get. I recently built editing machine with a USB 3 enabled motherboard basically for just this reason.

I've never considered that class 10's would offload quicker than class 6, like Barry said I always assumed it was only write speed that was affected.

I have 10x class 10's for my GH13 and 10x Class 6's for my HMC151. With wedding season starting in a few weeks I'll soon see if the offload time is any different.
 
Of course Barry, just as we have seen sub par brands not even perform to their class.

Not that wiki is always right, they do say the class is (should be) the same minimum for read and write: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital (the table 40% down). They also refer to it as the "transfer speed" in which I'm assuming would be either R or W. Isn't read always traditionally faster then write anyways?

also interesting:

"The maximum transfer rate of SDXCs which follow the SD 3.0 specification was announced as 832 Mbit/s (these are called UHS104 speeds[38]), with plans that the SD 4.0 specification shall increase this to 2.4 Gbit/s."

So that's a max of about 100/MB a sec for SDXC - nice improvement. The combo of SD 4.0 and USB3 is where its at, cant wait!
 
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Unfortunately no SDXC for us HMC150 users. Though I don't see why. I would think it could be done with a firmware update. Since my PC's just need an updated driver, and some of them have SDHC readers that a quite old.
 
Very true, and a update should include SDXC. I will be after the the af100 sooner then later which I failed to mention in my can't wait quote...
 
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