SanDisk has announced a new series of faster CF cards – the Extreme Pro cards. The big number that SanDisk is throwing out there is 90MB per second max read/write speeds. The question is: “Does it make a difference?”
Well, I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet; however, spec-wise the Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 50D should be able to take advantage of the speed boost. Both cameras feature UDMA support up to Mode 6 for a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 133MB/s, which is well within the new SanDisk cards specs.
Lori Grunin over at Cnet’s Crave took the new Extreme Pro cards for a spin the the Nikon D300s (I couldn’t find any documentation confirming the extent of UDMA support for the D300s) and the Canon 5D Mark II. The differences were minimal in both cases. The D300s produced the same frame rate with Extreme Pro and 60MB/s flavor of Extreme cards. The Pro version was able to give about a 10% savings on buffer emptying after a burst of shots. The results were similar in the 5D Mark II, which got a boost of 0.2 frames per second with the Pro model and an almost 20% discount emptying the buffer after a burst of shots. Hit up Lori’s test for all the facts. [50 kudos to Lori for the hard work.]
Prices? The 64GB model will set you back $811.99 direct from SanDisk – I’ll say that again . . . $811.99! $507.99 for the 32GB model and $304.00 for the 16GB model. Hardly a bargain for a 0.2 fps advantage…
Get the full run down on these new cards in the news release below.
Company Introduces World’s First Commercial 16-gigabit, 3-Bit-Per-Cell NAND Flash ChipSAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, February 6, 2008 – Reaching a new threshold in the development of flash memory,