Thanks a lot for all your quick answers.
What Fargo911 is saying makes perfect sense. As he suggested indeed it might be an adaptive formula which changes after some amount of samples.

Thanks again.

The number on the display is really just an estimate. It really depends on what you shoot, since depending on the scene, the image file size can be larger or smaller, depending on many factors, such as a large range of colors, shadows, etc. I think they are really just taking the approach that based on an average file size, that you would get roughly that many photos on the card.

D700

NEF Lossless compressed 14 bit requires 16.3MB per file = 490 shots on 8GB
NEF uncompressed 14 bit requires 24.7MB per file = 323 shots on 8GB

The D700 manual shows for either image quality above 308 shots on 8GB

Nikon did not make any correction to this data in the manual, but my suspicion is the manual is in error. Your camera is probably working fine. No pun intended.

@Geogre - the number of shots can change if You change the settings, i.e. shoot in crop mode, change from 14bit to 12bit and it gets updated all the time when You shoot.

Nikon is very conservative with the number of shots possible on a card. I can easily get 400-600 shots on an 8GB card. There is nothing wrong with your card, that is normal.

Hi Guys,

I know this is an old post but i still hope someone can answer this one.
O.k If i stick an 8G into my D700 at 14-bit i see on the display that i should be able to shoot 302 photos. However i have noticed that once i approach 300 shots taken (i do not know the exact number ), the display is updating with something around 190 remaining shots . I am not sure what is happening... But certainly i never see the remaining number of shots on the display going to 0 (or a value close tho it).
When i see this happening i stop shooting and i change the CF because i do not want to have corrupted files or something like this.

Did anyone see this behavior?

tzb said:
On my D3, the camera software predicts following numbers with an empty 8GB card:
14-bit:
288 uncompressed
288 lossless compressed [interesting...]
426 compressed
12-bit:
375 uncompressed
375 lossless compressed
515 compressed

Keep in mind that lossy compressed 12-bit file is generally an image reduced to 9.4-bit and then compressed losslessy.
I always shoot 12-bit lossless, which in practice results in 550-600 RAW files per 8GB card.

Welcome to the forum, tzb. In my experience, the camera displays worst case number remaining when in lossless compressed because final file size depends on image content. It seems like I used to end up getting about 10-25% more pictures than the number the camera gave me when starting a card on my D300.

The benefits of using several smaller cards, rather than just one larger card is that they do have a finite life (tens of million write operations?), which even for heavy users isn't going to be bumped into too quickly. Best not to worry about it and swap them out every once in a while (day? week? month?) and I have heard of some photographers who swap them out every shoot! I have four 8Gb cards which get cycled though on a regular basis (weekly) and it works well enough.

If one should break/die/just not work one day, the impact is (relatively) limited. If one should get stolen, then again the impact is (relatively) limited as only one is lost...

Almost every electronics store in America will sell 8Gb cards starting at about $20 depending on brand. If you are brave and shop at WalMart, then they are even less and for example Class 4 8Gb SD cards atart at $15, but watch out for the off-brands as I don't know how good they really are.

The cost of a decent card is not high compared to the cost of the camera and lenses in the first place, is it?

EKoo said:
Out of curiosity, what is the advantage of shooting (raw+jpeg) and not just raw? Jpeg quick viewing for client??

Personally for quick refrence in a windows folder rather than opening another program.
In my workflow I store three folders, one in camera jpgs, one raws and another edited images...Everyone's got their own way of doing it ?
And if anything catastrophic happened I'd still have the best quality jpgs in a folder somewhere...I need some wood to knock on lol.

Out of curiosity, what is the advantage of shooting (raw+jpeg) and not just raw? Jpeg quick viewing for client??

On my D3, the camera software predicts following numbers with an empty 8GB card:
14-bit:
288 uncompressed
288 lossless compressed [interesting...]
426 compressed
12-bit:
375 uncompressed
375 lossless compressed
515 compressed

Keep in mind that lossy compressed 12-bit file is generally an image reduced to 9.4-bit and then compressed losslessy.
I always shoot 12-bit lossless, which in practice results in 550-600 RAW files per 8GB card.

when I format my 8 gig card in my D700 it says i have 360 shots (raw + basic jpg). I usually get a little more than that, depending on what I'm shooting.

Full image size details for the D700 can be found on page 23 here: (Plus a list of "approved" cards) http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcamera/slr/d700/pdf/d700_24p.pdf

Funny as I was looking at this earlier today!

HTH

That is what i needed to know thatnks. I was thinking about getting 4-5 8gb cards so that works well. They dont dont have that much weight and would rather have to much then not enough for shoots.

237 Raw + Fine Jpegs, 303 Raw only on a 8gb card on my D3 so it should be the same for a D700 ?

Get two 8 GB cards and you will have a backup with you always :)

I am looking at cards for a d700 and shoot raw. I was looking at a few of them but was wondering how many gb to look for. Torn between 8gb and 16gb. Any help from people with 700's would be great. Thanks in advance. Oh and niko please tell me this is not somewhere else, I looked forever=)
~cheers