When SanDisk released the Extreme III cards, they were touted to be the fastest around, with additionally the sturdiness and flexibility regarding usage (temperature, etc) that professional photographers need. Today, SanDisk has the Extreme IV card rated at 40 MB/sec throughput. Competitor Lexar has the UDMA CompactFlash, rated at 45 MB/sec, while Sony is entering this arena with 20 MB/sec rated CompactFlash cards. 

A couple of years ago, speeds such as these would have been all hype, but useless as no cameras could make use of them. Now, with Canon’s EOS 1D Mark III and Hasselblad’s H3D cameras, the fastest cards are simply a necessity to get the most out of those cameras.

While the Sony CompactFlash is a new product that is well suited for their own dSLR, the Alpha 100, the SanDisk and Lexar cards are really for the fastest cameras around --they will probably be capable to maintain a speed high enough for the newest Canon EOS 1D, but certainly for cameras such as the Hasselblad H3D-31 and the Sinar M, which we recently reviewed.

The SanDisk Extreme IV enabled the Sony Alpha 100 to continuously shoot frames at approximately 3 frames per second, without stopping at the camera’s theoretical maximum of 6 RAW images. To test the throughput of the card, I plugged it into a FireWire 800 port and ran IntechUSA’s Benchmark tool on it.

The throughput figures showed the CompactFlash 4GB was capable of sustained throughput performance of 40 MB/sec, using the Extreme FireWire 800 card reader. The question now is when Lexar will release its 300x CompactFlash