Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I was posed an interesting question by a customer which hasnt occurred to investigate before despite it's utility. I've scoured the Internet for this information and nada. I even spoke with my Nikon representative and he's unsure.

Does anyone know the Nikon D700 BUS speed?

It has to be faster than 55mph or the bus will blow up.

the reason why people are unsure is probably because "why"?
Is bus speed going to have any affect on picture taking?

Yeah, irrelevant question really. BUS speed to the memory controller? 5 fps & 8 fps w/grip. No point in breaking it down any further as the data is always constant.

which bus? I'm pretty sure modern cameras have more than one bus.
OTH my camera takes the car most of the time.

Interesting replies given here.

The customer could have been interested in the max supported memory bus specification on the D700 so he could purchase a memory card best rated for the camera - which could be UDMA mode 6? (i dunno the spec)

Try this link:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera ... =6007-9550

Precisely, the fps with or without a bg is already stated any where you would look so that is obviously not why the question would come up. It's more a question of economics like foggy guessed. If the D700 is your only camera for a while why spend 20-30% on high speed cards when your bus rate uses it at a 20-30% slower rate. Sure you can use them later in another faster camera but thats not the point.

Thanks hotwire for the link.

I can see your point, but I think the "BUS Rate" would probably always be faster than the cards speed. I would presume the card is always the bottleneck.

Thats kind of good question though. Lets say a camera can shoot 10fps before it fills its buffer, at what speed will it transfer to the card before the buffer is empty? I'm pretty certain that if the sensor can transfer 10fps to the buffer, the buffer can transfer at the same speed to the memory controller, there wouldn't be any reason for it not to.

So... once again, you're looking at FPS. If the D700 shoots 5fps with an extremely extremely conservative estimation of 10mb per RAW+JPEG, you're looking at 50mb/s, faster than any of the cards on Hotwire's list. Thus, the need for a buffer, to wait on the CF Card.

If someone is looking to save 30-40% on a memory card for their D700, I don't think they would mind waiting an extra second or two for the buffer to empty Maybe we were a bit quick to judge the question, but I still think its pretty redundant.