Which Compact Flash Cards That I Use and Recommend? SanDisk and Lexar

Posted by bpham on Mar 16, 2012 in Blog | 1 comment

SanDisk 16GB 400x or 60MB per second.  This one is the one I rate #1 in my list in terms of speed and reliability.  There is no issue whatsoever in the last 2 years that I’ve used it. The description of this version states “Shock protection and RTV silicone coating added inside for protection against moisture and humidity”…

The link to the faster on SanDisk 16GB 600x is here.

 

 

 

Another one and particularly this 600x version of the Lexar brand is also as good as the SanDisk and I also have used it in the last year or so without any issue, read or write.  The speed for this one is faster than the SanDisk that I have above, however, if your camera does not need the extra speed due to your camera internal processing speed or you don’t need to shoot actions (like sports, birds, moving objects, etc…), then the SanDisk version above should work fine and is cheaper.  In my case, I mostly do landscape and my camera can go up to 5 shots/sec in RAW, therefore I don’t really need the Lexar because I can wait a bit before looking at the results on the camera display.  However, with that being said, with the Lexar, sometimes, when I do exposure bracketing using my camera automatic bracketing function, it would burst 7 shots (for my 7 shot-auto-bracket setting), then I could see the results faster than the Sandisk, but like I said, to me, it is not a big issue.  This particular bundle, 2 pack, 16G each card, 600x, is a good deal right now and has a standard Lifetime Limited warranty, or you can get just one here.

Apparently there is a new Lexar 16gb 1000x just came out, and therefore this card is no longer the fastest one that Lexar produces.  To buy one of those 1000x, you can follow this link:

Lexar 16gb 1000x Compact Flash card

Or if you want to get the 600x Lexar from Amazon, this will take you there:

Other brands besides these two brands, however, I did not feel comfortable nor wanted to take some risk losing pictures therefore even though they might be cheaper, I stopped using those.

Other recommendations in terms of using these with your camera:

• If you can, before each trip, format the cards with the camera that you’ll intend to use them with.
• Backup your photos to external devices while on the trip, each day if you can.  As much as I believe that these cards won’t fail in the near future, but eventually something will fail, like anything else and you don’t know when that will happen.  Usually I carry with me a small portable lap top and an external hard drive, which I use to back up the photos to the external drive when possible and I also upload these photos to a cloud storage such as from Box.net.  I don’t reuse, ie erase images on the cards and reuse the cards during the trip in order to have multiple copies of the images as backups. If I think I would be needing more memory before a trip, I just buy more cards.
• I’ve used these cards in extreme weather conditions, such as snow, rain, heat, sand, sea, etc.., and they’ve not failed yet.  I store them the normal way, inside my backpack, or if they were in my camera while being used, so no special things that I’ve done to these cards.  Maybe it would be a different story if I was at the North/South Pole…
• Also, I don’t buy anything larger than 16Gb, because, as they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket…if something goes wrong with a card during or after shooting, I would not lose that much work.

For more information on how these CF cards work, you can read more technical information from this link.

For more photographic needs, please use this link below.

 

B&H Website