Number of exposures on big CF card

[Frankenstein]

I've started playing with RAW files, and when I make this setting on the D70 the camera indicator shows 96 exposures remaining for an empty 1 GB card. However when I've looked at the file sizes of the raw shots, they're averaging about 5.5MB each - when I do the maths that should mean 186 exposures. Now, I've heard elsewhere that the camera does underestimate the number of shots remaining, but by half?? So I just sat with my finger on the shutter button and filled the card, and guess how many exposures there were - 186! It seems amazing that the software can underestimate by this magnitude.

Frank

[johndec]

Yeah, crazy isn't it This has been discussed several times here and on other forums, some say it's just Nikon being conservative, others say it's a stuff up when Nikon forgot to allow for the fact that the NEF's are compressed when they designed the firmware.

[digitor]

It's documented in the manual, it uses the example of 44 shots capacity for 256M card, camera displays 23. (Page 45)

Cheers

[SoCal Steve]

What makes no sense to me is that the D70s has the same problem with counting NEF exposures according to Nikon's .pdf brochure for it. You'd think that they would have fixed that this time around.

[sirhc55]

From my own calculations the in-camera size of pics depends on the amount of information within each pic. This being the case, you will never get an exact number of pics for a given size of CF.

[MCWB]

Frank: a rough rule of thumb is that you can double the amount of exposures left that the camera shows when shooting RAW.

[Greg B]

.... which, at least, is better than having to halve it