Compact Flash recommedations?

C

Cliveyp

Suspended / Banned
Messages
58
Name
Clive
Edit My Images
Yes
Now I've taken the 50d under my wing it's time to grow the Compact Flash collection. I've bumbled along with a couple of old Sandisk Extreme III 4GB cards for the last few years in the 400d, but one of these will be going with the camera when I sell it to my dad.

One of the cards is highlighted as 30MB/s, which I've noticed they now class as the Ultra series rather than Extreme, is this because it's now such old tech??

I'm not wanting to spend bucket loads, and am probably looking at a couple more 4Gb or a couple of 8's. What can you guys recommended?
 
I use sandisk with no problems, but cheaper and in my experience trouble free are Transcend, off Amazon.

HTH
 
I've got 2 16Gb Duracell 60Mb/s and 2 16Gb Duracell 30Mb/s CF cards from www.7dayshop.com and for the price are terrific cards. The transfer speeds are bang on with my USB 3.0 card reader and all work perfectly well and have a 10 year guarantee as well. There's plenty of other makes around but, just be aware that the market seems flooded with fake Sandisk cards at the moment so be careful where you buy from.
 
I use Sandisk Ultra 4GB and 8GB for CF and SD cards. Never had an issue. I usually purchase from Premier Ink or Pic Stop online.
 
Sandisk are good - and most of mine are. However I did recently purchase a Duracell 16gb for a great price - and it's been a very good card.. Now is around 8 months old and regularly used..

So either of those would get my vote.

Also have a Transcend card that went a bit funny once - but has been doing ok since :) I use it now for only non-essential works...
 
I mainly use scandisk 8gb 60mb in my 50d they are around £28 delivered on amazon. I have also used Transcend which were pain free.
 
I knew I couldn't be the only one wondering about this :lol:

I've just bought a 50d and planned to buy an 8 or 16gb card - should I stick with smaller cards for compact flash or are the big ones reliable.

I also get confused by the sandisk branding so is the ultra quick enough for a 50d or should I buy the extreme :thinking:

Also how many pics can you get on say one 8gb card?

Thanks to the OP for asking this question :thumbs:
 
I have used Sandisk and Transcend without any problems in the camera.

If you happen to be an ipad user, you might be interested to know that the only problem I have experienced was copying images from the Transcend (8GB UDMA 400x) card to the ipad using the Apple card reader adapter. 9 times of 10 the tansfer would fail. The error message stated something like "cannot support this device as it draws to much current". I had no such problems with Sandisk cards.

Chris
 
Any brand of memory card will be prone to a potential failure irrespective of brand.
To be honest unless you need fast read write times then cards around the 20/30mbs will suffice in a 50D.
Go with whatever best fits your budget from the main names.

I have 4 x 4gb transcend 133x cards and they compliment the 50D's frame rate and buffer limit.
I paid approximately £7 per card of eBay.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This is all good stuff to read, thanks guys!

I've found play.com doing the Sandisk Extreme 40MB/s 4GB cards for £15 today, so there's an option there. I might also look into the Transcend options on eBay at that price, as a couple of those for day-to-day use would be perfectly fine I'm sure.

To the other poster asking about sizes, my current 4GB Sandisk Extreme III (old 30MB/s version) gives me about 177 shots in Raw on the 50d. I probably wouldn't like to risk many more on a single card with fear of failure, so will probably look towards 4's and 8's. I'd be too concerned about loosing too many shots on a 16GB.
 
Is it not also true that there are a lot of "badgers" around (ie. brands that simply buy & badge) rather than make their own in their own fabrication plant?

Example: I have 4 apparently identical Kingston SD cards (same branding, same capacity, same speed, same part number) - but when you look at the low level manufacturer ID they are Toshiba, Toshiba, Sandisk & Toshiba... 3 of them run significantly quicker than the 4th.

From memory those left in the fabrication game are: Sandisk, Toshiba, Micron & Samsung - there maybe more but unless you buy one from the fabricators you can never be entirely sure exactly what you're buying...
 
modchild said:
I've got 2 16Gb Duracell 60Mb/s and 2 16Gb Duracell 30Mb/s CF cards from www.7dayshop.com and for the price are terrific cards.
Click to expand...

Note that Duracell quote the read speed of their cards, which is often more than 50% faster than the write speed. Sandisk, Lexar and Transcend quote the write speed, being as that is more relevant for photographers.
 
I have wasted a lot of money ordering cheap non-branded memory cards from ebay which have never lasted for more than a year or so, so nowadays I trend to stick to Sandisk.
 
Gsrai said:
I knew I couldn't be the only one wondering about this :lol:

I've just bought a 50d and planned to buy an 8 or 16gb card - should I stick with smaller cards for compact flash or are the big ones reliable.

I also get confused by the sandisk branding so is the ultra quick enough for a 50d or should I buy the extreme :thinking:

Also how many pics can you get on say one 8gb card?

Thanks to the OP for asking this question :thumbs:
Click to expand...

I would not get a 16gb or larger card as if it fails you might lose a lot of pics better to have more smaller cards 4 or 8 gb.

8GB gives me around 270 ish raw +Ljpg

30mb/s is quick enough for a 50d
 
Be careful buying sandisk especially off eBay, stick to amazon or play don't know to much about 7dayshop.
 
Thanks Tristian - ill stick with 4gb (and thx to the op for the question :))
 
I'm working with an 8GB Sandisk Extreme CF Card which is 60MB/s & faultless.
 
I've got a couple of 4GB Sandisk Ultra (think they're the 30MB/s version) a 8GB Sandisk Ultra and a Transcend 16GB (also got a couple of 1GB Jessops jobbies but I keep them for my old 400D). The speed of the Sandisks have never been a problem in my 7D, even when shooting video or using high speed shooting at a rubgy or cricket match.

The Sandisks have never given me any trouble and they are all at least 3 years old. I got the Transcend last year and when shooting in RAW I was quite often getting and error message of "Unexpected end of file" when trying to open in Lightroom.

I tried recreating the problem as I thought it might be related to turning the camera on/off inbetween shots or viewing deleting images. Both of those actions seemed to increase the number of bad files I got but even without doing them, there were still a number of shots affected. Difficult to put a percentage on them but I'd guess around 5%-7%.

When shooting in JPEG you get a message on the screen telling you there was a error recoding the shot.

I keep it in my bag for emergencies but try not to use it unless I have to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top