I was just wondering if the D700 supports compact flash cards that use UDMA. As I don't know what UDMA is I figured I'd ask the guys that would. For anyone interested in 4gig pny compact flash card with UDMA costco has a good deal on them right now. $49.99, the same card is 79.99 at tigerdirect.

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11290055&whse=BC&Ne=4000000&eCat=BC|79|43064|56019&N=4024953&Mo=27&pos=1&No=15&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&cat=56019&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-US&Sp=C&ec=BC-EC18767-Cat2109&topnav=

From the Sandisk site:

UDMA - what's it all about?

'UDMA' stands for Ultra Direct Memory Access - has become the new watchword for high performance in compact flash memory cards. Several newly launched DSLR cameras support the UDMA protocol and UDMA memory cards rated at 266x, 300x and higher are now on sale. UDMA memory cards rated at 40 MB/s (266x), 45 MB/s (300x) and higher are now on sale from SanDisk.

What is this exciting new UDMA technology?

DMA is a process by which data can be moved from a storage device very efficiently, without labouring the host device's processor. Ultra DMA is a set of definitions for faster and faster theoretical transfer rates ranging from Mode 0 (16.7 megabytes per second or MB/s) to Mode 5 (100 MB/s).

For those who didn't know, the speed rating is based on a 1x CD-ROM's read time of 150kb/s so a 300x card is rated at 300x150=45MB/s.

The D700 supports UDMA based on Nikon's product page. The manual states "Up to 100 photographs can be taken in succession; note, however, that frame rate will drop when the buffer is full". By having a faster card like a 300x UDMA card, the camera can write from the buffer to the card faster and reduce the chance of the aforementioned frame rate drop. With the right card reader (like the Sandisk Firewire one), UDMA CF cards will also download to your PC/Mac at much faster rates.

From a review at Photoreview:
Capture lag was negligible and shot-to-shot times too brief to measure with the 4GB Lexar Professional UDMA card supplied for this review.

Continuous shooting was to specifications, with the high-speed mode recording FX JPEGs at five frames/second. File writing speeds appear to be able to capitalise on the speed of the new UDMA cards. A burst of 10 large/fine JPEGs took 8.1 seconds to process, while 10 TIFF files took only 12.3 seconds to process and store. Nine uncompressed NEF.RAW files were stored in only 9.5 seconds.

I guess the bottom line is, it will support it but is your shooting style going to benefit from it?

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>I was just wondering if the D700 supports compact flash cards
>that use UDMA. As I don't know what UDMA is I figured I'd ask
>the guys that would. For anyone interested in 4gig pny compact
>flash card with UDMA costco has a good deal on them right now.
>$49.99, the same card is 79.99 at tigerdirect.
>
>http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11290055&whse=BC&Ne=4000000&eCat=BC|79|43064|56019&N=4024953&Mo=27&pos=1&No=15&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&cat=56019&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-US&Sp=C&ec=BC-EC18767-Cat2109&topnav=

I've been using a couple of older Lexar 4 GB 300x UDMAs for some soccer games. I haven't had any performance problems with or without the MB-D10 battery grip.

Pete
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Thanks for the replies, guess Ill pick a couple of them up.