January 26, 2013
Bull Elk At Sunset in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, and The Hoodman Steel CF Card

This bull elk was fairly cooperative to stand near the horizon with a colorful sunset behind him. If he would have moved forward about one body length to get right on the horizon, it would have been perfect. Or, moving forward two body lengths to get on this side of the horizon would have been better than having cut off legs like in this image. I couldn't move closer up the hill towards him because that would have exposed an ugly background on the next hill.

Is The Hoodman Steel CF Card Worth It?

That's the million-dollar question. Almost literally because the Hoodman CF cards are so expensive, about twice the price of the next fastest cards. For landscape photography, the answer is obviously no because even a rapid 7-stot capture for an HDR image can be handled by a camera's buffer and the CF card's speed doesn't limit the capture. For wildlife photography, where you don't want to be caught with a full buffer when the action continues to get better, this is a valid question.

I recently purchased a 32GB Hoodman Steel CF card that is UDMA 7 compliant and rated at 1000x. It's supposed to have a write speed of 145 MB/s and a read speed of 150 MB/s. Those specs are better than the 32GB Lexar Professional 1000x UDMA 7 CF card which also has a read speed of 150 MB/s but an officially-undisclosed write speed. An independent tester measured about 92 MB/s write speed, and Hoodman boasts: "Building a 1000X CF card that reads @ 150 MB/s is easy. Building a 1000X CF card that WRITES @ 145 MB/s is rare!" I had read reports from trusted nature photographers that the Hoodman CF cards let you keep shooting, almost like there was no buffer, and that's what got me interested in them in the first place.

So, how does the Hoodman Steel CF card perform? And by perform, I mean how fast can it offload data from a full buffer as measured by the achievable frame rate.

I tested the three types of CF cards that I have in the Canon EOS 7D (firmware 2.0.3), the Canon EOS 1D Mk IV (firmware 1.1.1), and the Canon EOS 1D X (firmware 1.1.1). I set each body to manual exposure mode, 1/4000 sec, f5.6, ISO 200, and attached it to the EF 70-200mm f2.8L IS II USM with AF off and IS off. All bodies were set to record RAW files and shoot at the maximum frame rate which is 8 for the 7D, 10 for the 1D Mk IV, and 12 for the 1D X. I formatted the card in the body to be tested then I held down the shutter until the buffer filled and continued shooting for about 7 seconds for one run and about 13 seconds for a second run.

The first thing I discovered was another ingenious feature of the 7D. When the light level is low, like it was inside last night, the body automatically slows down the maximum frame rate from 8 to 4 fps. That's so you can continue to see something through the viewfinder when there's low light, as in a slow shutter speed, even though you specifically asked for a really, really, fast shutter speed to guarantee achieving the maximum frame rate. Those guys at Canon are so smart! I discovered through a Google search that you can bypass this ingenious feature by holding down the DOF (Depth-Of-Field preview) button before and while shooting, and that's how I obtained the following data.

The next thing I discovered was that the firmware I had been using in the 1D Mk IV (1.0.8) was not up to date and the body choked on the UDMA 7 cards with a frame rate of 1.37, about 1/3 the frame rate for the UDMA 6 card! After updating the firmware to 1.1.1, the faster cards performed much better.

For both runs, I looked at the last five full seconds of images captured and used the ExifTool by Phil Harvey to determine the capture time. For the second run, I also looked at the last full ten seconds of images captured, then I averaged the three calculated frame rates, or frames per second (fps). The dollars-per-gigabyte ($/GB) were calculated using the current retail price from B&H. Note that the Lexar Professional 1000x CF cards currently have a significant instant rebate that ends on January 31st. Here's how it panned out. I am quite surprised that the Hoodman CF card doesn't provide better performance than the Lexar Professional 1000x CF card on any body, and actually slows down the 1D Mk IV and 1D X. So, after all of that explanation, and 2902 frames shot, the answer for me is no, the Hoodman Steel CF cards are not worth it. I'm so glad I shelled out the big bucks for that expensive card. The Lexar Professional 1000x CF card sure looks like the best card, not only for your money, but also for pure performance.