Product Description

Sandisk CompactFlash Karte 4GB Extrem IV

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11890 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: SanDisk
• Model: SDCFX4-4096-902
• Released on: 2006-11-26
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .28 pounds

Features

• Read Speed: 266x (40MB
• Included
• High Durability &
• Includes Travel
• ESP

Manufacturer's Description
As the leader in high-performance flash technology, SanDisk introduces the newest flagship products - The Extreme IV line of Compact Flash. The Extreme IV line of Compact Flash is a newest digital film cards for the high-end professional photographers, who require the highest possible performance and the largest capacities for their medium format and high-end digital single lens reflex (SLR) cameras. It has extremely fast read/write speeds (Up to 40MB/sec). It provides the highest durability, speed, and quality demands on the market today for serious photography.

Customer Reviews

Can you Digital SLR take the speed?

I bought this card and was very happy with it, but I didn't really notice any speed benefits over lesser quality cards.

I didn't think the card was at fault as it performed well enough and wasn't about to believe that Sandisk would provide an Extreme III as an Extreme IV! I looked into my Canon Digital SLR, that was a revalation!

Apparently all Canon and Nikon Digital SLRs cannot make use of the enhanced speeds of the Extreme IV, Nikon's latest cameras use the PIO5 transfer standard for Compact Flash (their SD cameras are excluded) so they can make use of the Extreme III which supports PIO5 and PIO6 but Canon don't even go that far (Ultra II covers the most advanced standard they support)!

It seems that although these cards are very, very fast with the correct readers that support PIO5 and PIO6 standards, most of the Digital SLRs do not (unless we are going into the price of a sports coupe territory for cameras). I sent my Extreme IV back and bought an Extreme III. The speed is just as fast, maybe 100k/s slower but not enough to make any difference in a Canon 5D or lesser camera, and this would be true if the card was an Ultra II. However, the price difference between the Ultra II and Extreme III makes it silly to go for the Ultra II as many card readers can make use of the better transfer speed from card to PC (plus the Extreme III has a better warranty and compatibility with the newer Nikons, and hopefully Canon if they ever catch up).

My advice is if you want the best, get the Extreme IV for pure flash (no pun intended) value. If you want performance and budget, the Extreme III represents the very best with no noticable speed difference - bear in mind that the lower capacities are faster, so a 1GB card is faster than a 2GB card which in turn is faster than a 4GB card etc.

In real world tests it's found that a 2GB Extreme III can transfer data off a Canon 5D Digital SLR slightly faster than a 4GB Extreme IV, so the real world difference is negliable.

The price difference however, is not.

Smooth as silk
At the time of writing, the Extreme IV is the fastest Compact Flash card generally available.

There are exactly two reasons why you would want a fast Compact Flash card. First, it means the wait between when your camera's buffer fills up and you shoot again is much less. Second -- and probably more important for a card of this size -- it will download to your Mac or PC in minutes rather than hours.

How much faster it does these things depends on exactly what you have connected up to it. Plugged into a FireWire card reader on a recent computer, 4GB downloads in a few minutes. Plugged into an older machine using USB 1, you won't see much benefit at all.

Likewise, to take advantage of its speed when shooting, you need a fairly serious Digital SLR. If you don't do much shooting at the camera's maximum frames per second for prolonged bursts, or if you don't have a recent high-speed camera (say 5 frames per second), you won't notice much difference on that either.

The rubric on the box makes it quite clear who this card is aimed at: it says 'For Professional Photographers'. It's designed to help you get the absolute maximum of speed from the fastest cameras, using the fastest card readers on the fastest machines.

This card is smooth as silk. It formatted on my D2X in a few seconds, and delivered dramatically improved refresh speed. At not much more than £50 at the time of writing, this is a good card at a good price. I have just one quibble. It's supplied with image recovery software for accidental deletions. A nice touch, since experience suggests that accidental deletion is by far the biggest risk to your images. The software is supplied for Windows and for Mac OS X. Again, a nice touch, since many photography professionals are Mac based. However, it's supplied on a mini-format CD. Mini-format CDs only work in tray-type CD drives. However, all recent iMacs, MacMinis, PowerBooks, iBooks and MacBooks have slot type CD drives. They won't work with a mini-format CD, and, if you don't happen to know that, you can seriously mangle your drive trying.

Beware of counterfeit version of this card
I've rated the item low simply to draw attention to counterfeit copies of this product being sold. I bought a "SanDisk IV 4gb" card from an independent seller and only got round to using it well past the date I could claim back for it.

It garbled a lot of the data (though thankfully I had the recovery software from other genuine SanDisk cards and managed to extract about 75% of the images - the recovery cd sent with the bogus card was unreadable by Windows).

Having now looked closely at the card, the top part reads 'CompactFlash'. Compared to my genuine cards, this looks extremely faint. There is also a typo on the reverse of the box which reads "Super fast read and wrie speeds" (note the 't' missing from 'write'). I have no idea whether this also occurs on the genuine box but it might be symptomatic. Other than this it unfortunately all looks genuine.

Beware of the low prices being asked for this card. You might end up getting what you pay for! I recommend you buy it from Amazon (or other reputable dealer) and approach independent sellers with caution. Hope this helps.