SanDisk Extreme Pro, In Fire And Ice We Trust

I love photography.  And it is not everyday news that you wake up one day discovering that the product you use has a new model is double as good.  I am a proud user of SanDisk’s Extreme IV CompactFlash cards for my Nikon D700.  It was their top of the line product trusted by the professional photographers.  Then comes this new Extreme Pro.  The maximum capacity has doubled to a jaw dropping 64GB.  The read and write speeds have been boosted up to 90MB/sec, double of my Extreme IV cards.  That is shocking, on paper at least.  But how does the card perform?  Well, here is a little test I have done on a lovely Sunday morning.

Simple Test Setup

The three memory cards on the tests are (1) SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/sec), (2) SanDisk Extreme IV (45MB/sec), and (3) Lexar Professional (300x speed).  SanDisk cannot test with their competitors’ products, but I can.  To be fair, all my cards – including this new review unit from SanDisk – are pretty respectable, in terms of performance, reliability, and durability.  SanDisk has provided me with some testing procedures.  But I prefer to test it under a real life scenario.  So, below is my setup.

If you take single shots, it does not matter too much if you memory card is fast or not too fast.  Though once, a friend called me up and asked, “You told me to shoot in RAW but it is just too slow to take one photo!”  I wanted to pull a fast one on him and tease him that his is not a Nikon, like I have advised him to buy.  Instead, I told him that his memory card maybe too slow.

In this test, I put my camera on continuous shooting mode.  I chose a slow 3 frames per second for my Nikon D700.  Simply because any higher it would be difficult for me to count the shots.  I switched off as much post processing of the photos as possible in order to put extra emphasis on the memory card performance (and in real life too, I switch them off for high speed shooting).  Of course, no image review.  Who would care about image review in sport shooting scenario?  During each test, I shot 40 photos.  And I shot in 14-bit RAW, which is higher than the rather common 12-bit RAW format.  I resisted shooting in RAW+JPG because (1) I seldom do that and (2) converting RAW to JPG takes time and may alter the result.  RAW is good.  It is what I shoot.

To recap: 3 memory cards, 40 shots, 14-bit RAW, 480MB of data, one camera.

Test Results

Lexar Professional (300x speed) – On paper, this card has a similar speed the Extreme VI that I own.  The entire 40 shots took 22 seconds to complete the transfer from the camera buffer into the memory card.  However, after 30 shots, my camera slowed down and the frame rates dropped way below 3 frames per second.  That is disappointing of course, although I was not surprised.

SanDisk Extreme IV (45MB/sec) – My bread-and-butter, these are the cards that I am happy to spend money on.  40 shots took 21 seconds to complete the transfer with no slow down to my frame rate. An additional 8 seconds to complete the process (40 shots should take about 13 seconds to complete using 3 frames per second setting).

SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/sec) – Less than 15 seconds was what it took to transfer all 40 photos (total of 480MB).  In fact, the write speed of the card no longer seems to be a limiting factor (the entire shot of 40 photos took more than 13 seconds to complete).  For the testing of this particular card, I have increased my number of shots to 100, almost instantaneously, all the shots are stored.

Afterthought: For my 12.1 megapixel full frame camera, it seems that SanDisk Extreme Pro is all I need.  I could of course up the frame rate from 3 to 8 per second (which I may if I can find a suited theme for my next photo shot).  One participant at the media event has maxed out his Nikon D3 camera buffer in continuous shooting mode and it takes 130 shots to do that, with this Extreme Pro card.  I doubt if I would be that extreme.

Who Needs This?

Although my test centers towards speed, SanDisk Extreme Pro has lots to offer too.  The card works in an extreme temperature range of -25°C to 85°C (hence the picture and the title if you get the drift).  It is designed to be durable for humidity and accidental drops too.  In terms of reliability, it uses a wear leveling technology to spread the data across different blocks of memory so as to maximize the lifetime of the card.

For those of you who have to have the largest capability available (e.g. sport photography and underwater photography), the 64GB version is too good to be true.

And for those who want to tap onto the potential of a higher speed, your camera needs to be able to utilize the UDMA 6 technology.  My contact in Nikon has informed me that all their high-end cameras – D3x, D3, D700, and D300s – are able to support UDMA 6.  It appears that Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 50D are able to support that too, though I have no means to verify.  As the image size getting bigger and more photographs elect to use their dSLR cameras to film HD videos, write speed of a memory card becomes a crucial attribute.

If you own a high end camera(s), you really need a memory card of a similar caliber to match.  For more information on technical specifications and pricing and etc., please click here.

PS. I have not tested on the download speed as the card has gone beyond USB 2.0 speed.  But I reckon the speed would be amazing, judging at what I have seen so far.