I'm looking into purchasing a larger CF Card (probably 32 or 48 MB). Does anyone have suggestions as to what brands are reliable and what ones are not? I saw Lexar was advertising theirs as being 4X other cards speeds. Is this true? Are they faster? Are Lexar cards good?

Any info would be a great help. Thanks in advance

K

-- Kim Dobson (crab@interlog.com), May 05, 1999

Answers

Kim, I have 2 Lexar CF cards. One in 64MB size, and one of their Pro series 80MB cards. I also have a San Disk 48MB card and the 8MB card that came with my Nikon 950.

The Lexar Pro series card is rated at 8X compared to other cards, the 64MB card is rated at 4X. In the Nikon 950 and Kodak 260 I just sold, the difference in time between shots is almost immeasurable. The Nikon camera took about 2 seconds less time to fully write a 6MB TIFF file to the Pro 80MB card than it took to write the file to the 8MB card that came with the camera. This is only about a 6% improvement. Hardly the 8X advertized by Lexar. Storing JPEG compressed files results in even smaller time differences. Writing times have far more to do with the equipment than the CF card.

All this said, I still like the Lexar cards. They seem to be industry leaders in coming out with the largest cards ahead of other manufacturers. I certainly would not spend extra bucks for theirs because of their claimed speed improvements, but they are good cards.

-- Steve (tuna-boat-captain@ibm.net), May 06, 1999.

I think the top brands are sandisk lexar and microtech. The latter two being slightly faster.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), May 06, 1999.