ATP sent us their latest and greatest - the ProMax II with a specified transfer rate of 300x. We put it head to head with the SanDisk Extreme IV and a few other cards. Let's see how this went.
To put it into the gentle words of Jeremy Clarkson, "POWEEEEEEEER!"
Except that he's going on about horsepower, while some photographers want the tiny silicone bits inside their gear to shift electrons around as quickly as possible. In other words, they want their cards to be seriously quick. Of course, most of them are just gearheads, but for a reporter, speed really is of the utmost importance. The manufacturers are all too happy to oblige them, of course - if their product has more megapixels, more frames per second, takes bigger videos or just looks really cool, it'll sell better. On the other hand, the media becomes the problem - 20 frames per seconds are no good if the card can't keep up with it. Also, there's the question of capacity - more megapixels need more megabytes, it's as simple as that.
Nevertheless, you need to take a breath and think about it - do you really need the fastest card? Or the biggest one? Or could that money perhaps be spent better, perhaps by going out for a beer with your friends? Think about it - when was the last time you missed a shot because your card was too slow?
The latest digicams have 12 megapixels. Who on earth needs that in a digicam? Yet at the same time, very few people will use a lower resolution, although the results would be no worse - after all, how many hobbyists print their pictures on A3 or larger?
I tested the cards with the Canon 40D and ...
Nevertheless, the manufacturers keep increasing the pixel count, making us buy larger and larger cards - a few years ago, with a three megapixel camera, 128 MB were quite enough for a day's worth of family pictures. With a 7 megapixel camera? Fuggedaboudit - it'll take about 25 JPEGs, if that.
Then there's the speed factor - we all like it. But how much is enough? Old CF cards had transfer rates of about 4 MBps for writing and 5 MBps for reading. Fast cards go to about twice that. And the SanDisk Extreme goes to about 40 MBps.
... the hottest camera at the moment - a preproduction Nikon D3.
What do all these transfer rates mean for the average photographer? A lot, if you're into numbers and specifications, and very little, if you just intend to use the card. So, what's the big difference between a 4 MBps and a 40 MBps card in practice? After all, wouldn't you be better off with a bigger and slower card?
The simple answer is, there's never enough memory. Nevertheless, this answer doesn't really account for the importance of speed.
Transfer rates are usually marked as X, where X is 150 KBps. The bigger the number, the faster the card. A few years ago, cards had transfer rates of about 4X or 8X. They're still perfectly usable today, if you're only doing family photography. After all, you're hardly likely to keep your finger on the shutter all the time. But get a camera with a bucketload of megapixels and video recording, and there's no way a slow card will do.
Personally, I don't really like tech specs. They're seldom indicative of real life performance, so I did my own testing. Before you go on and read about the testing, though - if you have a digicam, you don't need anything more than 80X speed, and even that only if you're trigger happy or shoot a lot of video.
But since I had the two fastest cards available, I really wanted to see what these speeds meant in practice. For years, I've been using various cards, from no name consumer cards to expensive pro cards.
