Extreme Pro - CompactFlash 16gb product reviews

I have always been a great fan of Sandisk cards as they have always proven themselves to have very high standards and they live up to their marketing, and when they dont, they pull the product off the shelves and simply own up to the fault. Something other card brands have trouble doing.

Having been a professional photographer for more years than I care to mention, I have seen the evolution from hand-processed black and white film through to full, rich digital colour images with detail starting to approach that of film. This progression of technology comes with its own pitfalls and highlights. One of the biggest pitfalls has been that as the detail increases (ie. the megapixel rating of the CCD gets larger), so too does the size of the file, and when you choose to shoot in RAW mode like I do, the files can be almost obscenely large.

In the old days, film was REALLY expensive, so you learned to shoot once and aim for the best you could get. Now, you can easily shoot a thousand shots and only keep the 2-3 that suit your needs, at no extra cost. To that end, I decided to test this card out by throwing as many shots at it as my Nikon D300 could snap, in RAW format, no compression. Each image file was around 11mb, with a variation of around 500mb, which meant that after converting the storage into 'real available space' I can store around 1400 images on this card - more than enough to cover even the longest wedding shoot.

The Nikon D300s can shoot in continuous mode for 100 shots at a rate of 7 shots per second. This means that the camera is 'pushing' data out at a rate of around 80mb/sec, a rate this card is well able to keep up with. In tests on my PC, using the widest possible bandwidth (USB 2.0) it managed to reach a fairly respectable 38mb/sec - which is nowhere near the theoretical limit of USB 2.0, but very close to the practical limit.

If your camera can take CompactFlash cards then this card is certainly a smart choice, especially if you shoot in RAW or RAW+jpeg modes and have better than 8 megapixel resolution. I did find though that downloading from the card took a considerable time longer than some other cards when there was over 500 images to do in a single batch. I am at a loss to explain the technicalities of why, only that when the transfer involved was larger than 5gb, the transfer speed seemed to drop. I strongly suspect it has more to do with the PC than the card though, but still something to be aware of.

Summary: A great card, though a little pricey for the aspiring beginner - a professional product targeted squarely at the professional market.