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00:00          *sighs* Okay,

00:03          so I just did a whole live show comparing the performance of the V90 versus The V90 cards and my plan was to edit that down into something nice and tight and easy for you to watch and I just realized that I never hit record.

00:16          D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!

00:20          So I don't have a local copy of the show… now there is still the youtube version of it, but it's going to be a lower quality. So let me just recap, but here's the actual test

00:29          [music]

00:36          Okay, now that that's done, here's basically what we've got. We were comparing the V60 to the V90 ProGrade cards. The reason that I'm doing this test right now – not a sponsored test by the way, however, ProGrade did send the gear out for me to do this test, but they're not paying for this or the results of it – the reason for this test now is because ProGrade is running a sale; 25% off through the month of July – that is July, 2019 – this month, right now. The code is… the code is JULY25OFF. Use the link down below to get to their webpage, pop that code in and then you will get 25% off. It's also worth pointing out that if you buy two cards from them, if you buy a bundle of cards, that is already discounted, then you can get a 25% off on top of that.

01:15          If however it is no longer July and you're watching this, you can still get a percentage off. You can get 10% off by using the code PHOTOJOSEPH10 so you can use that code to get 10% off it if it is no longer July, so the whole purpose of today's test was to compare V60 to be 90. It is faster; V90 is faster. It is 90 megabytes per second versus 60 megabytes per second. I went into all the reasons why you might want to have one over the other in the video, in length, which you can still watch. You can go back, you can… if you click here, you can watch the entire thing if you really want to, but I'll give you the quick rundown of it. The advantage of V90 over V60 is threefold in my personal opinion.

01:51          The first one is probably the most important one and that is copy time. Remember that these speeds are not just about writing to the cards, but copying from the cards to your computer. The V90 copies significantly faster, and that is something that we saw in our test results. The second is that V60 at 60 megabytes per second *is* above the threshold of what you need to record with the highest bit rate on the GH5 which is 400 megabit, which translates to 50 megabytes per second, so you still got 10 megabytes per second of head room. However, as cards get used as they get older with a lot of use of repeated use and not getting a clean format, which is something that you can only do in the computer, then (and it takes a really long time), then your cards do tend to get a bit fragmented and you can get poor performance.

02:31          And so after extended use, you may find that you have to do a clean format because the cards are no longer performing adequately and by not performing adequately, what that means is that you hit record and then it goes, Ooh, the is not fast enough. Now, personally, I've never seen this happen but it is technically possible. The third reason is future proofing. If you buy a V90 card today, you know that you will be supported in formats that may be coming down the line. I'm not saying anything that is or isn't coming, but we can pretty safely assume that data rates are going to get higher, formats are going to get bigger and at some point down the road you are going to want a faster card. If you buy the V90 today then you are future-proofing yourself a little bit. So with that said, let's go over the test results.

03:12          The first test that I did was a write test from the GH5 to the memory cards, to both the V60 and the V90. I fired 66 frames on both cameras and timed the difference to see how long it would take to clear the buffer. Essentially wait for that write light to stop flashing and the results were with the V60 card; 27 seconds to clear the buffer of 66 frames of photos, whereas only 20 seconds for the V90. That comes in at a seven second difference, or a 26% difference. So pretty significant difference there. Where that matters is if you're shooting fast action sports, you're shooting a lot of frames… if your buffer fills, your card isn't fast enough and you are still writing to the card, the buffer hasn't cleared and you can't squeeze off that critical next shot… that's where it makes a difference.

03:55          So having the faster card there does matter. For the video write tests, I didn't actually do those live because there's no need to. I simply recorded onto a V60 and a 90 card, the same thing on two GH5 bodies pressing start and stop recording at the same time. I recorded a series of smaller files plus one very long file; a very large file so that we could do the copy differences off of those. So those are the two write tests. The video write tests isn't really a test, we're just getting it on there. The write test for the stills was to see how quickly it cleared the buffer. Then we switched over to copying tests, copying from the card to the computer. I started on a 2015 MacBook Pro, which is the MacBook Pro that I have; an older machine, it has USB 3.0 not USB 3.1. We did three tests here.

04:35          I started by copying from the internal card reader to the internal SSD, then copying from a ProGrade card reader. This one right here, USB-C, USB 3 but it's to USB-A; USB 3.0 on there. So we did a copy for that and then we copied using the dual card rear here, copying two cards simultaneously to see what the speed differences were. And here's the results. Copying those 66 files using the internal SD card reader came in at 36 seconds. Using the ProGrade USB 3 reader was just 22 seconds, so it was noticeably faster using the external reader, which I have to be honest actually surprised me a little bit. I didn't think it would be that big of a difference, but then copying dual cards simultaneously was significantly faster. Now here we may have seen a benefit of having already copied the cards before because it was even faster than I expected it to be.

05:21          Ideally, in a perfect world, what you should be seeing is that it makes no difference whether you're copying one card or two. The timing will not be a combination of the two; the time will simply be the time that it takes for the longest card to copy (the biggest card to copy). And we do see those results repeated later on. Here we saw a little bit of a skew. It was only 18 seconds to copy them both, which doesn't really seem possible, so it does tell me there's probably a little bit of caching involved in there. Then from there we moved over to a Mac mini. Now the Mac mini has USB 3.1; USB-C all the way through so we definitely have faster performance there. So there I did tests copying both stills and video files both off the V60 and the V90 to the internal SSD, and here are those results. Copying the still photos off the V60 (the same 66 photos) came in at just 12 seconds.

06:05          Again, comparing that to the 36 or 22 seconds that we saw previously. Off the V90 it was a whopping eight seconds, so significantly, significantly faster in there. Even just V60 to V90 in here is a difference of four seconds or 33%. So again, quite the difference between the V60 and the V90. This tells you that if you are in a mission critical type of work where you have to get your pictures off the card into the computer as fast as possible (Olympic photographers come to mind here), every second counts. The V90s will make a difference for still photographers here. Copying the video files, we saw a copy time – again, quite a large dataset – from the V60 it took four minutes and seven seconds. V90 took two minutes and 32 seconds. A minute-35 faster or a 38-1/2% difference.

06:51          So again, let's just call it a third faster, a third less time to copy off the V90 than it does off the V60. After that we went into copying dual card tests, running both V90 cards simultaneously, so stills and video on the V90, and both video cards, so a V60 and a V90 video card simultaneously into that Mac mini. So using the dual card tests, the results on that were again pretty significant. Um, let's actually go to video first here. Copying the V60 video plus V90 video came in at just four minutes and 14 seconds compared to the separate times of copying both of those cards at six minutes and 40 seconds. So a significant savings there. And essentially if we look at the raw data here, what we're seeing is if the total time here for both was four minutes and 14 seconds, we scroll up to see what that data is made of.

07:39          The V60 before took four minutes and seven seconds. The V90 took two minutes and 30 seconds. So really the longest time here, four minutes-seven pretty well matches with what we saw here. Again telling us that it doesn't matter that you're copying two cards, the bus wide enough to allow all that data to come through at once. All you're going to be limited by is the longest card, whatever the longest time to take for any one card. That's going to be your total copy time. But of course if that first card finishes first, you can always pop that one out and insert another one while the second one is going as well. The other test here with the V90 still and V90 video was oddly exactly the same time as the copy for both simultaneously. So I'm not quite sure what happened there except to say that the times that we're comparing are two and a half minutes for video and only eight seconds for the stills.

08:22          So it's such a tiny data set that I think we're within a margin of error that we just didn't see the difference in there. But um, but regardless, having those two slots is clearly an advantage.

08:31          So there you go. Those are my test results. If you do want to watch the entire video, it was, it was lengthy because we had to watch through all those copy times, but there was a lot of chit-chat going on in between. I encourage you to watch that live show that'll pop up right here at the end of this video, right over my face here. Hey, if you haven't yet subscribed to the channel, please do make sure you do that. Just hit the subscribe, hit that little bell, follow me on social @PhotoJoseph absolutely everywhere. I talk about all kinds of things photo and video related here on this channel and I'd love to see around more often. Take care!