As I bide my time for the Canon EOS 40D to come to a B&H store near me (online), I have been slowly find flaws with my current body – the Canon EOS 350D (a.k.a. the XT). When invited to a high school football game last night, one of my Canon camera buddies lent me a second body so I could have a wide angle and a zoom at the ready for changing situations without having to swap out lenses on a single body. As it turned out, I pretty much stayed on the zoom the entire night, but that’s not the interesting part.
What was interesting was the performance results. The body I was lent was the EOS 10D, which has much more of a heft to it. Since it was incompatible with the EF-S lenses, I had to put the kit 18-55 on my XT, and my 70-200 (f4.0) went on the 10D. After adding a 550EX flash, the setup was quite heavy.
For the first half I noticed that the buffer in the 10D took about the same time to fill up as the XT, which seemed odd, as I knew that the 10D had a smaller pixel count (6.3 versus 8.1) and both are rated at about 3.0 fps. What amazed me though, was the write speed once the buffer was filled. The 10D took as many as 30 seconds to write all images to the card, where if I was on the XT, I would have been shooting again in 10 seconds. By the second half I had switched back to the baby XT (size wise) for its superior Megapixel count and write speeds. Turns out, the size doesn’t always matter…