Big Sur Naval Station

Buying Compact Flash Cards

Just a short post.

This post will only apply to those of you who use cameras with Compact Flash (CF) cards. Almost all point and shoots have switched over to Secure Digital (SD) type cards but most DSLRs still use the higher quality CF cards. Canon and Nikon have turned to the dark side with their XTi and up Canon models (the xxxD series) and the D80 and up (Dxx series) for Nikon. They use the slower SD cards.

Over the years I have always been of the opinion that people have been wasting their money by buying cards that are too fast. Camera bodies only operate at some maximum speed and buying cards that work at higher speeds is just wasted money. Some people argue that the  higher speeds are useful when downloading the cards from the card reader to the computer. But that is only true if your card reader and computer both support the higher speeds. I just let the download happen in the background while I read email or do something else so I have never been in all that much of a hurry anyway.

In the Canon 30D and Nikon D70 days camera bodies only ran at 8 MB/sec or so and almost any reasonably fast CF card was faster than that. So it made no sense whatsoever to spend 3 times as much on the the Super Ultra Fast version when the plain old fast version was fine. Camera body speeds have crept up until the 40D/D90 are in the 11-13 MB/sec range so buying 133X or 266X cards was justified. Still a lot cheaper than the top level cards which work at 40 MB/sec or faster.

Also buying premium brands never made a lot of sense either. If you go to NewEgg and check out the buyer reviews, and there are a fairly large number of reviews, and those reviews are good then so far as I can see you are safe buying the card. Now does that guarantee that your card will never fail, of course not. But I have heard of all sorts of brands failing including SanDisk and Lexar brands. I have personally bought and still have cards from Transcend, PNY, Kingston and RiData and have never had one card fail. One additional worry you have with buying SanDisk cards is the flood of counterfeit SanDisk cards on the market. They do have a very high failure rate. So only buy SanDisk cards from a major safe vendor.

However with the advent of video capable DSLR cameras manufacturers have really jumped camera write speed up. This can be seen on any of the Canon bodies with the Digic 4 processor ( 5D Mk2 and 50D) and in the Nikon D300/D700 bodies. The write speeds are now in the 30-35 MB/sec range and you are now wise to buy a top grade card. The newest Canon Ti has video capability but uses a SD card which would seem to be problematic. Of course the Nikon D90 does the same.

Ron Gailbraith has updated his database of camera and card speeds and it is well worth browsing through for information about this subject. He has a good write up on CF card technology as well as the difference in CF and SD cards. CF cards have built in electronics to speed up data transfer rates that SD cards lack.

Tom’s Hardware has a recent review of the upper end cards that show that the Transcend cards are just as fast effectively as the pricey SanDisk cards. A SanDisk Extreme III 8GB card is $105 from Amazon while the Transcend TS8GCF300 8GB 300x is a little cheaper at $82. The 266X Transcend TS8GCF266 which is rated at 40GB/sec is only $68 from NewEgg.com. Those prices are only true for the day I post this of course.

This could obviously be a major expense if you are upgrading from one of the older model cameras and have a bag full of older cards like I do. I suspect that you might do just fine with 266X cards unless you are doing video captures. Then you probably do want the max speed.

So if you have a pre-Digic 4 camera from Canon then you should be just fine using 133X cards. Even the speed demon Canon 1Ds MkIII only writes at 20 MB/sec and the 1D MkIII is 15 MB/sec. The same is true for older Nikons the D70 and so on. If you have newer models then you may need to buy at least some faster cards for video capture.

If you want maximum transfer speed from the card reader to the computer then you need to be sure that your card reader is UDMA compliant.