Another Memory Card ?

[not_nuf_time]

My kids play basketball, I have a lens that will get to an f/4. With the lighting in a gym not overly bright, my speed of capture causes a blurred picture when players are in motion. My Question is, I've heard there are memory cards that can lay down an image faster, so to get a good pic I don't have to upgrade my lens to a $700.00 f/2.8 zoom. I have a Nikon D70; and a Nikon f/4 70x 200 lens. Thanks.

[WCS]

I don't believe a memory card will help you out. A faster card will read and write faster but will not affect your exposure. Some options are to increase your ISO to 800 or 1600. You will have more grain and noise, but it will get you a faster shutter speed. A good speedlite flash can also help. The cheap pop up flashes are poor in a large gymnasium. Of course the faster lens will also help out. Here is a picture I took of my daughter. I use a Canon digital rebel with the kit lens. In this photo, I used my 580ex speedlite flash. The camera was set a ISO 400, f5.6 at 1/60

[buzzsaw]

WCS, I like your signature! A wise man does not urinate against the wind

[Dbl]

The card will not help you at all, as mentioned that is a read, write function. As suggested your cheapest option (free) if you don't want to use a faster lense is to up the ISO. Here is a basketball shot taken at ISO 1600 with an 70-300/F4-5.6. Exif data was Pentax istDS at f4.0, ISO 1600, 83mm, 1/125sec.

That is as slow a speed as I think you can get away with and have any hope of stopping any action, and as you can see not everything was frozen with no blur. This shot was cleaned up with a noise reduction program and brightened up slightly in post processing. Fortunately my camera has a good reputation for shooting at higher ISO's or I am not sure I would have even bothered taking any of the shots I did this basketball season. I am in Florida now shooting baseball games (9 games in four days and 1500 shots so far) and even under the bright Florida sunshine, sorry, I am still using an ISO of 400 to 800 to generate shutter speeds around 1/2000sec to stop action.

You should be able to get some acceptable shots with that lense. Plan on shooting a number of pictures and accept the fact you will delete a fair amount. You should also plan on having to spend some time on cleaning up your shots with whatever form of software you use for your camera. A good noise reduction program will be essential. Don't plan on making large prints of those shots, you will be disappointed.

I am in the same boat as you and can't afford to upgrade to a better lense, so I do the best I can with what I have. Most of my shots are in an on line gallery so the fact that the shots are somewhat "noisy" is an acceptable trade off over no shots at all.