One of the things I hate the most after shooting an assignment is waiting seemingly forever as my pictures are slowly downloaded from the memory cards into the computer.
No matter how fast your computer is, often times its the speed limit in the card and your card reader that causes those agonizing bottlenecks.
Well photo pros, wait no more, (or at least wait less) because Lexar has a new line of professional grade 300x speed compact flash cards now with arguably the fastest file transfer speeds ever. Its their Lexar Professional UDMA line of gold colored CF cards, ranging from 2 to 8 Gigabytes in capacity.
I just bought a couple of these in 2 and 4 GB flavors and also Lexar’s new Firewire 800 UMDA CF card readers. With the combination of using Lexar’s new UDMA CF cards and their UDMA reader, supposidely you can get card to computer transfer speeds of 45 Megabytes per second—–so says Lexar. This is the same speed claim as SanDisk’s brand new Ducati Extreme Edition UDMA cards, but since SanDisk just released them, at $164 MSRP for a 4 GB, i opted for Lexar’s more estabilished, more available, and definitely cheaper option. My Lexar cards were from B&H at $49.95 for the 2 GB, and $87.95 for the 4 GB. The Lexar UMDA card readers were $59.95 a piece.
The cool thing about the Lexar pro card reader is its stackable, and can be tethered off one another, so you can essentially download up to 4 different cards to your computer, all via fast Firewire connection, at once!
So how did the new Lexar cards fair out? Well in my very unscientific testing so far, I’ve been able to top out at about 21 MB/sec transfer speed, which is only half of what Lexar claims. But, compare that to only 3.9 MB/sec for old my SanDisk Ultra II cards, thats still 5 times faster! If it took 5 minutes to download my pictures before, now it’ll only take 1 minute. Thats 4 extra minutes for me to tag, crop, and upload when i’m on a deadline. Those few extra minutes could mean a lot at say the end of a big football game when every wire service is in competition with each other to get their pictures out the first. The earlier your pictures are on the news wires, the more chances they’ll be picked up for use by ESPN, SI, and all the other big media outlets.
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