Here are some tips to get the most out of a Nikon 7000’s internal image buffer, where images are stored after being taken, but before they are transferred to your SD card. This buffer limits the number of shots you can take in a single high-speed burst. This is particularly important when shooting in RAW, and you are trying to eke out every last frame in a burst. Out of the box, the buffer when shooting in RAW is 7 images, much less than the marketing value of 15 for RAW. This is because a number of options are set for the consumer market. I guess Nikon figures prosumers can figure all of this out.

First, turn off high ISO noise reduction, long exposure noise reduction, distortion correction, and active-d lighting. Even though most of them don’t apply to the RAW images themselves, they *do* apply to the JPEG preview saved inside of every RAW file – even when you aren’t shooting in RAW+JPG mode. Also, go ahead an set the RAW mode to 12-bit compressed (not lossless) – the size of the RAW images matters a lot in how fast you fill the internal buffer of the camera.

Finally, use a high speed SD card. Slow cards basically guarantee that you won’t write more than one or two frames out to the card while shooting your burst. With a fast card, you may get three or four. If you are looking for a fast SD card, there’s a new line of Ultra-High Speed cards out from Sandisk that are very expensive, but are rated very well. There is a new line of faster UHs cards from Sandisk that are expensive but super quick. ($140 for a 32GB card, at the time of this writing.)

All of this will push the buffer itself from 7 images to 11, and the faster card will let the image write out of the buffer to the card quicker. With a sufficiently fast card, you will be able to pull off 15 shots in about 3.5 seconds, which is pretty good, and the fast card will help the buffer clear quicker so you can get back to shooting the next burst.

As a final note, if you shoot JPEG, not RAW, simply dialing down the image size will make the buffer go crazy. With the settings from above, and the Small JPEG setting, you can easily run into the 100-shot limitation Nikon has set for a single depression of the shutter release. The good news about that is it doesn’t fill the buffer, so when it stops shooting, just lift off and hit it again, and you’re back in for another 100 shots.