Finally a great price on the 5D3 from an authorized reputable dealer, and it's not Thanksgiving weekend! If you're ready to go full frame, this a about as low as I've seen them on sale. Just know that you'll probably get a kind call from Abe's to verify the order and do a little sales press to ask you if you need a case, etc. I bought my 50mm/1.2 from them and the fella did the antiquated push (with a Brooklyn accent) to sell me a UV "protection" filter. I answered him back with my Brooklyn accent and told him I have something to protect the lens... a lens cap. He thanked me for the order and said goodbye. Don't give in, and don't worry, they don't bite.
If you're coming from a crop Canon DSLR, chances are you've got a stash of SD cards. Those will work in the 5D3 if you're only shooting scenic, etc. But if you plan on any event shoot where you need to fire off a lot of shots, the SD card support in the 5D3 isn't too hot, it doesn't support UHC-I for some reason. You'll want to use CF cards for sports and weddings, etc. The Lexar 32GB 1000X cards I use give me 29 full RAW images before the buffer kicks in. Just wanted to note the card situation if you do events. Also note that the Lexar 32GB and 64GB cards are the fastest, the 16GB cards are slower for some reason. I'm not sure if that's the same for SanDisk. But at this point in time the 32GB cards seem to be the most stable across manufacturers for some reason. Wow, remember the days when we stuck with 2GB and 4GB cards for reliability sake? Glad that's long gone! Actually, we can thank the SSD demand for that, the push to maintain reliability on SSD's gave us more reliable CF and SD cards in the end. Most huge high volume storage companies are abandoning spindle-base drives and are switching their servers to SSDs. That's important, because we as photographers benefit greatly because we now get more reliable cards. Same technology, just a smaller case. Works for me!
Thanks for the valuable info Paul,
I was reading that SSD's are great, and I like the fast boot on my Puget, however they do have a limited life, so that you should never try to defrag them, or otherwise overwork them.
No doubt we're all careful with our backups.
Frank O
Just a quick note here about my Intel 520 240GB SSD.
I installed it in March of 2012 in my Puget machine. I just looked at the SMART data for my drive:
Estimated Life Remaining: 100%
Media Wearout Indicator: 0
Host writes: 11.4 TB
Power On Hours: 904,000
Timed Workload Hours; 65,500
Error Counts: 0
Used Space: 105GB
Free Space: 118GB
The drive has never been defragged, nor has it ever gotten above 60% of it's capacity.
In short, later series SSD's from the major players should last a long time under even heavy use, as long as care is taken, and you have good cooling in your machine.
As Paul says, the makers of the SD and CF cards are doing much better with their NAND chips and the firmware. controllers,k due mainly to the rapidly escalating SSD segment.
Frank, I don't think you have anything to worry about, especially with a Puget computer--you'll likely buy a new machine before the SSD fails.
Discussion
2 repliesIf you're coming from a crop Canon DSLR, chances are you've got a stash of SD cards. Those will work in the 5D3 if you're only shooting scenic, etc. But if you plan on any event shoot where you need to fire off a lot of shots, the SD card support in the 5D3 isn't too hot, it doesn't support UHC-I for some reason. You'll want to use CF cards for sports and weddings, etc. The Lexar 32GB 1000X cards I use give me 29 full RAW images before the buffer kicks in. Just wanted to note the card situation if you do events. Also note that the Lexar 32GB and 64GB cards are the fastest, the 16GB cards are slower for some reason. I'm not sure if that's the same for SanDisk. But at this point in time the 32GB cards seem to be the most stable across manufacturers for some reason. Wow, remember the days when we stuck with 2GB and 4GB cards for reliability sake? Glad that's long gone! Actually, we can thank the SSD demand for that, the push to maintain reliability on SSD's gave us more reliable CF and SD cards in the end. Most huge high volume storage companies are abandoning spindle-base drives and are switching their servers to SSDs. That's important, because we as photographers benefit greatly because we now get more reliable cards. Same technology, just a smaller case. Works for me!
I was reading that SSD's are great, and I like the fast boot on my Puget, however they do have a limited life, so that you should never try to defrag them, or otherwise overwork them.
No doubt we're all careful with our backups.
Frank O
I installed it in March of 2012 in my Puget machine. I just looked at the SMART data for my drive:
Estimated Life Remaining: 100%
Media Wearout Indicator: 0
Host writes: 11.4 TB
Power On Hours: 904,000
Timed Workload Hours; 65,500
Error Counts: 0
Used Space: 105GB
Free Space: 118GB
The drive has never been defragged, nor has it ever gotten above 60% of it's capacity.
In short, later series SSD's from the major players should last a long time under even heavy use, as long as care is taken, and you have good cooling in your machine.
As Paul says, the makers of the SD and CF cards are doing much better with their NAND chips and the firmware. controllers,k due mainly to the rapidly escalating SSD segment.
Frank, I don't think you have anything to worry about, especially with a Puget computer--you'll likely buy a new machine before the SSD fails.
--P