Olympus C8080 Memory Card Write Speed Test

This is a test to measure the write speed of the Olympus C8080 to different memory cards.

Update June 17th, 2006: even a firmware update to the latest firmware does not speed up the 8080.
It appears that the 8080 writes with a maximum of 0.9 MByte/s (sustained) to CF cards.
There is no advantage in using CF cards faster than 30x (actually the camera is write-limited to 6x, but we didn't test the write speed with slow CF cards).
The maximum write speed to xD cards is 0.8 MByte/s (sustained) . Since xD cards are more expensive than CF cards, the only reason to use xD cards is if you want to use the 8080's inbuilt panorama function.
These write speeds are painfully low. The Olympus 5050 for instance is capable of writing at 2.5MByte/s (sustained) to fast CF cards and manages to write a RAW image to CF in about 3 seconds. The 8080 needs at least 12 seconds to write a RAW image to a memory card.

The time the 8080 needs to write a burst of five RAW files (taken in the Hi mode) to the memory card was measured.
For this the camera was set to manual mode, with a specific aperture and exposure time. Focus was locked and the internal flash disabled.
RAW was selected as the file type.
The Hi mode was activated.
The shutter was pressed until the camera finished taking the last frame.
With a stopwatch the time was measured which passed between the instant the shutter was pressed and the instant the camera finished writing the last frame to the memory card (when the red light stopped blinking and the camera was ready to shoot again).

Card Type: CF=Compact Flash, CF II=Compact Flash type II, xD=Extreme Digital
Brand and Model as written on the cards
Size in MegaBytes
Write time: the time in seconds needed to write five RAW image to the memory card
Write speed: 5 x RAW file size / write speed (= 59MB / write time in seconds). In MB/s
Firmware: The firmware version of the camera.
Read time: the time the camera needs to display a RAW file in playback mode (here the xD card is faster)