The Sports Photo Guy

The BiWin 16GB UDMA CF card sells for a mere $50.  Is it a real bargain, or a candidate for The Crap List?  Click thru for the verdict.

Might be a bit of a bargain.  It doesn’t set any speed records, and at least BiWin is honest about the claimed 150x write speed, as it scores a barely passing grade of 60 (D-) in the JPG burst test and an agonizing 2.9 fps and 9.4 MB/sec effective throughput in our RAW test.  But these are better scores than many of the slower UDMA cards.

Read scores are decent, reaching 31 MB/sec in the Delkin FireWire 800 reader under Windows Vista, and 24 MB/sec in the Lexar UDMA Dual-Slot USB reader under Windows XP.  These results put the card firmly in the middle of the pack.

At $50, this is indeed a bargain for a huge card that will download fast.  BiWin’s reliability is a big question mark, however.