The Sports Photo Guy

The newest crop of SLC cards from most of the smaller card makers have effectively re-centered our test results, raising the bar for the elite group of cards.  Consequently, many cards have been downgraded as the truly fast cards stand out while the older MLC-based cards have dropped to the realm of the also-rans.  New card rankings can be found here.  More info after the jump…

A word is in order about test methodology and what makes a “real world” test.

When I first published my test results, representatives of a “major card maker” contacted me to question how I came up with lower results for their product than they expected.  They tried their best to impress me with the name of some high-tech gadget they used to measure card speed and how it showed near-identical results for their card versus their major competitor.

I wasn’t impressed.  I don’t know about you, but I use my CF cards in a camera, not in some whiz-bang industrial measurement device.  Likewise, so-called “tests” of write speeds conducted in a card reader, or read/write tests performed with test software designed for measuring the speed of hard drives, just don’t measure real-world conditions if you ask me.  That’s why my write tests are performed in camera, and my read tests care performed transferring images.  Seems pretty simple to me.

Case in point: if I put three cards, the Pretec 433x, Hoodman RAW 300X, and SanDisk Extreme Ducati cards into a Lexar Professional UDMA Firewire 800 card reader and run HDD Tach on them, I get burst rates of 42.5, 43.1, and 42.1, respectively.  Yet the “slowest” card, the SanDisk, blows the others away once you put it into a camera.  That’s what I’m here for!

SanDisk 4 GB Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash Memory Card
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