Compact Flash CF Card Round-Up

Reviews: Storage

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Dec. 28, 2005

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Closing Thoughts

Over the course of this article we have tested the performance of 8 compact flash cards from 7 companies with various speed ratings. We used 2 cameras to conduct write testing - a Canon PowerShot A95 point-n-shoot and Canon's EOS 20D Digital SLR. Using the A95 and the 20D allowed us to examine the difference in performance between a consumer and professional-grade camera. What we ended up finding out is that you won't really notice any difference with a high speed card in a point-n-shoot camera with regards to write performance.

Read testing was done with the help of 4 camera readers (3 USB-based and 1 PCMCIA-based) and the 2 aforementioned cameras. What we ended up finding out here was that the USB-based card readers perform on about the same level, the 20D with USB 2.0 connectivity transfers pictures faster than the PCMCIA reader, and the A95 with USB 1.1 connectivity transfers pictures the slowest by far. If you choose a USB-based card reader, your choice will mainly depend on the features and price. At the moment I can not recommend buying a PCMCIA card reader based on my test results, though I would like to get my hands on some different PCMCIA card readers to see whether the one I used was representative of the performance of all PCMCIA-based readers. If you have a camera with USB 2.0, direct transfer times will be decent, but you would notice the difference in speed if you purchased a USB card reader. If you've got a camera with sub-USB 2.0 connectivity, I would definitely recommend buying a card reader, since transfer times were painfully slow with the A95.

Finally, we wrapped everything up with a price/performance analysis, and I made my recommendations. SanDisk's Ultra II is not the most expensive, costing $15 less than Lexar's 80x card, and yet it performs the best. If you're looking for most for your money, the Ultra II is the obvious choice. If you want good performance on a tighter budget, I would definitely go with ATP's 60x card because it performs similarly to the Lexar 40x in the write tests and actually reaches speeds 2MB/sec greater in the read tests (saving about 20 seconds of transfer time in my testing), plus it costs $20 less! If you have a point-n-shoot camera and you transfer images through a PCMCIA card reader or through a camera with a sub-USB 2.0 interface (or if you just want the cheapest card) Crucial is the way to go.

I hope that you have found this article to be helpful in choosing a compact flash card and/or card reader. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment on the article. In the future I would like to do an update to this article in which I will test more compact flash cards and card readers. I would really like to get some MicroDrives for testing, and I am interested to see the performance of Firewire-based card readers and some other PCMCIA-based solutions.

Cameras

Canon PowerShot A95 (check prices)
Canon EOS 20D (check prices)

Card Readers

SanDisk ImageMate External USB (check prices)
SimpleTech FlashLink External USB (check prices)
SanDisk Notebook Adapter PCMCIA (check prices)
*Mitsumi Internal Reader no longer available through our Price Index

Compact Flash (CF) Cards

SanDisk Ultra II 1GB (check prices)
Lexar Professional 80x 1GB (check prices)
Lexar Professional 40x 1GB (check prices)
ATP High Speed 60x 1GB (check prices)
Kingston Elite Pro 50x 1GB (check prices)
SimpleTech 1GB (check prices)
PNY 1GB (check prices)
Crucial 1GB (check prices)

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Real-World Write Performance
Page 3: Real-World Read Performance
Page 4: Overall Performance & Price/Performance Analysis
Page 5: Closing Thoughts

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by blackjet on January 3, 2006 - 2:47 am

Hay Kurtis,

Great article, never really thought about the speed of CF, something worth considering when i finally get round to buying myself a digital camera rather than borrowing my dad's all the time! :-)

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