Compact Flash CF Card Round-Up - Articles / Reviews

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Compact Flash CF Card Round-Up

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian

Dec. 28, 2005

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Introduction

A few years ago I really started to get into digital photography, and like any amateur I had loads of questions. At first my questions were very simple, such as... What does aperture mean and how does it affect my photos? What's the difference between optical and digital zoom? Why does my point-n-shoot camera take so long to take a picture once I've hit the button?... and so on. Those and many more simple questions have long since been answered, and a little less than a year ago I moved on from the world of point-n-shoot to using a DSLR.

Since I had never had any experience with any SLR (digital or film) in the past, I once again had many questions to find the answers to. Rather than try to slowly figure things out myself, I decided to call my friend Al who is a full-time photographer and ask if he would be interested in having an intern. So last summer I spent a lot of time with Al going to various local shoots and helping out in the studio, and I learned a lot in a short amount of time. Another of my friends, Karl, has a lot of experience with photography as well, so any time I run into a problem, I've got some people I can turn to. I am by no means an expert after three years of being interested in photography, and less than a year with a DSLR, but I have learned a thing or two.

In the new year I am going to be working on a series of photography-related articles which will serve to answer many questions, some simple, some not, which I've run across so far. I will be working on editorials, reviews, guides and tutorials, so that's something to look forward to in '06. As an appetizer to all of that though, I'd like to answer one question that I think many amateur and even some professional photographers have. What kind of performance can you expect in a real-world situation from various Compact Flash (CF) cards? The reason this issue is important is that the price varies for CF cards of different brands and speed ratings. I will attempt to find out what benefit higher-speed CF cards actually have under various circumstances, and going a step further, I will find out if there is any bottleneck incurred when transferring data via card readers or directly from cameras. I have rounded up 8 CF cards from various vendors with various speed-ratings, as well as 4 different card readers, and I'm ready to put them through their paces.

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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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