Memory cards have become a lot cheaper and bigger in memory size over the last years. Compact Flash is still one of the most common, stable type amongst all Memory cards with a good ration Memory/Euro. Writing speed is claimed to be one of the biggest criteria when looking for a memory card and of course having spent already several thousand on your Photo Equipment one does not want to be a scrooge when it comes to purchasing the card. After all it should be the best one - right ?

So which one does the job? Looking for a speedy card today, you can find: Ultra, Ultra II, Extreme III, High Speed, Ultimate etc. The list of superlatives goes on and on depending on at which vendor you're looking.

Well, I had already collected some cards with my Canon 300D and with the purchase of the Canon 30D, Canon was so nice to give one SAN DISK 512MB away for free as part of their promotion. This was the chance to test this supposably "slow" card. The test setup was very easy: Tripod, focus on the bright sky to get a very short exposure time and then press the shutter button in continuous shooting mode until the Camera buffer is full, this until the moment the camera was finished writing the data on the card is the measured time you find listed below. Variations in JPG, JPG+RAW plus a test with the old Canon 300D to see the effect on a slower camera also.