Product Description

Extreme IV is the new industry leader in the best-in-class solution for high profile professional photographers. As the elite flash memory cards available on the market, Extreme IV has extremely fast read/write speeds. This line provides the durability, high-speed, and quality demands for serious photography. SanDisk?s award-winning technology solidifies the strength of the Extreme IV family of high-performance flash cards. Designed to meet the critical speed and performance needs of serious professional photographers. Significantly improved workflow efficiency for capturing, viewing, upload and transferring large image files Ideal for demanding photo shoots under severe weather conditions?heat, cold, wind, rain, snow, etc.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62272 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: SanDisk
• Model: SDCFX4-2048-902
• Released on: 2006-11-26
• Dimensions: .29 pounds

Features

• Read Speed: 266x (40MB
• Write Speed: 266x (40MB
• Included
• Warranty: Limited
• High Durability &

Manufacturer's Description
Extreme IV is the industry leader in the best-in-class solution for high profile professional photographers. As the elite flash memory cards available on the market, Extreme IV has extremely fast read/write speeds. This line provides the durability, high-speed, and quality demands for serious photography.SanDisk's award-winning technology solidifies the strength of the Extreme IV family of high-performance flash cards.

Customer Reviews

This card is FAST
If you have a high end digital camera, you will want one of these cards as a minimum. The maximum read and write speeds are both given as 266x (or 40MB/s, according to the SanDisk specs), so they allow cameras with continuous shooting to get on with the job of snapping away instead of waiting precious milliseconds for the onboard buffer to empty out.

There is no point buying a camera which can shoot frames in rapid succession if it is hampered by a delay due to a slow card. Invest the extra few quid in a fast card! It's only a tiny fraction of the total cost. I currently use a Canon EOS 40D, and this card allows it to maintain the maximum shooting rate of 6.5fps until the camera's buffer is full.

In practice, a Canon 40D writes JPEGs to the card at about 8.6MB/s and RAW files at about 11MB/s. This is not brilliant, but that's a limitation on the part of the camera. At least the card is fast enough to let the camera perform to specifications, and this is actually one of the best-performing cards available for that particular camera.
The only card that performs better with the EOS 40D (from any brand you would want to touch) is the Sandisk Ducati 8Gb, and who wants to pay all that money for an extra 0.1MB/s?

Strangely this card performs horribly with the Canon 1D Mark III writing RAW files at a measly 11MB/s (1, 2 and 4Gb Extreme III cards work best with that body), but it is one of the best performing cards when used with the 1Ds Mark III where its performance is just shy of 20MB/s for RAW.

If you ran out and snapped up the new EOS 5D Mark II you will be delighted to hear that it can write to this card at about 30MB/s.
The Nikon D3x beats this with a write speed of 32MB/s. Pah, show-off.
The Nikon D200 just exceeds 9MB/s and the Nikon D300 is a vast improvement at just over 30MB/s. The Nikon D700 is just a touch slower.

The overall winner is the Sony A900, which writes to this card at just about 33MB/s.

In most people's reality the card maximum of 40MB/s is only likely to be attained reading data from the card. The SanDisk Extreme Firewire reader reaches this speed, but the SanDisk Extreme III USB version is probably better value since it is a lot cheaper and reads at a respectable 35MB/s.

Because this is an Extreme IV it comes with the individual neoprene-style carrying case (as well as a standard plastic case), and a backup/recovery utility disc. Note that despite its high spec this is NOT a UDMA card.

Sandisk Extreme IV
I have a number of sandisk cards for various cameras and the great thing about them is they always work well without any problems. Its great to know that here is a product that is tried and tested and would therefor have no problems in reccomending sandisk cards, I have found them to be very reliable. They are mostly used with Canon and Pentax cameras.