Compact Flash Update

I bought a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III card last June when I got my camara, now its pretty clear that a single card is a little scary so time to get a backup.

Tong Family Blog: Fast Compact Flash Cards

Rob Galbraith did actual in camera testing with the Digital Rebel XT to see what were the fastest cards. For most of these, the RAW write speed wwas the most affect with the Sandisk Extreme III 1GB and 2GB having identical performance at 4.888MBps write JPEG and 6.26MBps RAW.

“Rob Glabraith”:http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007 has continued to update his databases, so here is the latest but its a bit old. “Bob Atkins”:http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/compact_flash_memory_cards.html has a great piece on this. He says essentially that for Canon digital Rebel and 10D, they were limitefd to 1.4MBps writing no matter what, but any Canon later than the 20D can wirte at card speed, so the 20D writes at 5MBps with the so called 60x cards and the 1Ds mark ii is at 7MBps. The Digital Rebel XT should be similarly fast, so getting a fast card matters. The Sandisk Extreme III remains very fast and it is cheap and writes at a healthy 20MBps, although most cameras can only write at 5-6MBps at most, so getting the Extreme III is probably the value leader card right now. You want these cards, because they handle extreme temperature ranges.

The highest capacity cardes are the Transcend 120x 8GB card which at $91 is a great bargain, but I’m not sure it will work that well for a camera at temperature extremes. Also the incredible 45MBps speed is mainly important for CF card to PC since the controllers in current cameras are limited to 4-7MBps. Means the Extreme III at 20MBps is a good match for today’s cameras and they are 1/3 cheaper than the Extreme IV at 1/2 the speed.

In terms speed, Sandisk just released their 40MBps Extreme IV series and in February 2007, Lexar introduced their professional UDMA cards with a 300x speed raing for 45MBps