Are Kingston 32GB Full Size SDHC Class 10 cards recommended for entry-level DSLRs?

Question

I am going to buy two of the mentioned cards for a holiday next month! And i would appreciate some feedback. Has anyone used this card on an entry dSLR such as the 550D? Do you recommend those cards?? Any feedback please?

Answer 1

Unless these are for parallel backup of each other or are much much cheaper than alternatives I would not recommend 32 GB cards if you can avoid them.

Having few & large cards rather than smaller and more of them risks loss of many files at once. I'd guess without looking it up that RAW + JPG gives you 1500+ images/32 GB and that any JPG mode gives you vastly more. The largest sensible side for a card is perhaps one day of photos except if you take a very small number per day. ie say 4 GB would be probably bearable if you need much less than 4 GB/day.

A class 10 SDHC card is rated at 10 MB/s transfer rate.
You may achieve a full 10 MB/s on USB 2 depending on processor etc. You may not. USB3 cannot go faster than the card spec.
A full 32 GB card will take 53 minutes to download at 10 MB/s. IF you need that much data downloaded at a sitting then the time will be equal or longer with small Class 10 cards.

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Added:

I see tenmiles mentions extended download time.
In the past I have noted some change in access times depending on the card contents but this should not happen with a competently designed system - and you would hope that Kingston were as capable as most of doing things well. A problem would occur if one continually overwrote existing files when downloading new ones but very few systems would do this and at a minimum there should be a warning.

Programs like Microsoft's sync tool allow incremental download of only new files and should have minimal speed penalty regardless of card contents.

Windows only - Arcane magic from the dawn of time: I use an old version of free MSDOS (gasp) XXCOPY which handles this well.
Using "XXCOPY /BB /S From_Drive_address To_Drive+Folder_Address"
will transfer only nonexisting files
Using "XXCOPY /bu /sx /m /nx0 From_Address To_Address" transfers only files with the A (archive) flag set and clears the A flag. Once downloaded this way files remain on card but are not involved in subsequent transfers using the same method. .

Answer 2

I use a Transcend 32GB SDHC class 10 card and while it works well I have found that with my camera (Rebel XS) on RAW I can take 2820 pictures. If I shoot JPEG the little counter thing that displays remaining images stays at 9999 for a while... So 32GB might be a bit much unless you're doing video, in which case I have no advice for you because I don't do video.

I've heard from several people to get multiple cards to avoid a basket of eggs situation, which you siad you're getting two, and that's great, but I would think that 32GB is a bit much.

Also, I have noticed that if I leave all the images on the card that as I take more and more images it takes longer to download them to the computer. For example, if I have 200 pictures on the card and they all already exist on my computer, then I take one picture and try to download it, it will take a while because the computer has to download all the other ones just to see if it already has them. So even if I have space for thousands of pictures, I download and delete them just to make the download go faster.