I am very fond of my Sandisk cards.
I also have a Sandisk 4.0 GB Extreme card, and did an interesting comparison. I held a recording time race between Ultra and Extreme, here in my livingroom. Recording a big buffer full of photos in multiple trials, the recording times were identical. The more expensive Extreme was no faster than this card. In my case, the recording rate has to be limited by my camera, a Nikon 8800.
Having a reliable card as large as 8.0 GB is very helpful.
My cards have traveled to Alaska, Mexico, and Ecuador, and have had to function in all sorts of conditions. They have recorded 100,000+ photos, each of which I desperately did not want to loose. I back them up as often as I can, but I still worry, and I have lost photos when other cards failed.
I am pleased to say I have never lost a photo from a Sandisk card - in spite of the abuse I put them through.
Last week I filled up my Sandisk Ultra II 8.0 GB with important photos - carefully staged photos of butterfly specimens at the California Academy of Sciences. I worked 12 hours a day for 8 days on this project. The card behaved as it always has, and every single one of the 2400 photos I took, made it home safely.
Do back your cards up often, but from experience I can say that I have a very, very favorable impression of this card. SanDisk 8GB/30MB Ultra II CF Card ( SDCFH-008G-A11, US Retail Package )
This is the best value in an 8 gig card. I've bought a couple super fast generic cards and they are slooooow. False advertizing. I will stick to name brands. I'm using this in a Nikon D2X and D200 and the card is plenty fast. It will empty a full buffer of 25 raw images in one minute, plenty fast for me. Faster brand name cards might be faster but more money. For me this is the right balance of speed and cost.
I've been using this card on my camera since early May, and I am completely enthralled by the flexibility that its speed and capacity give me. Try as I might, the closest I've come to filling this card up on my Canon XTi was on a 5 day long trip where I shot over 3,000 pictures on Medium/Fine quality (2816x1880). I didn't have my computer or any other storage with me on the trip, so I was anticipating having to go through and start deleting pictures at some point to be able to keep everything I wanted and still be able to shoot more. On the third day though, I realized that I had only half-filled the card with about 2,000 shots. I was also able to get a 90-shot burst at 3fps on medium. For the most part, Medium/Fine resolution on the XTi will be good enough for most prints. I've printed up to 11x14 with a bit of post-processing with great success.
So the card by itself will handle a very photo-happy trip with the right quality settings. But when I'm going out for something a bit more deliberate, say some portraits for a friend, I can shoot about 800 photos in RAW, and almost 450 in RAW+JPEG-large! (though if I need JPEGs I usually just do a quick batch conversion when I import everything onto my PC into Adobe Lightroom)
However my favorite thing about this card is that I can use it to shoot timelapse without having to tote my laptop around. If I can get access to an AC outlet, or use the inverter in my car for field-work, I can set up my camera with just my locked shutter release cable or the converted intervalometer I sometimes snag from my friend. This means I don't have to bring my laptop, I don't have to set up the software with the cabling, I don't have to worry about powering my laptop, I don't need to quickly respond to any computer-to-camera communication issues, I can set up and move much more quickly...there's just a boatload of advantages!
If I shoot in medium/fine resolution, this card will give me enough frames for a 2-minute, 24fps high-definition time lapse video. If I shoot in small/fine resolution (1936x1280 is still higher resolution than 1080P video's 1920x1080) I can do nearly 4-minutes. And if I want to sacrifice a small amount of quality for length, shooting at small/regular I can get nearly 10-minutes of timelapse video.
On the speed side of things, this card is plenty quick. Surprisingly I get a fast transfer straight from the camera over a USB cable than with my card reader, but it might just be a bad card reader. But I can transfer a nearly-full card in just a few minutes. Camera to card transfer is pretty fast, and it only takes a few seconds for the buffer to clear after single a RAW+JPEG-L shot, and about 20 seconds to clear the full buffer (good for 9 RAW+JPEG-L, 12 RAW, or 90+ Medium/Fine pictures)...
I also have not had a single instance of data corruption or any other problems with this CF card. It's solid as a rock and I'm extremely glad that I didn't go for something smaller or cheaper.
i shoot water pics in raw with a nikon d200. i have used this card over 25 times, about 200 gb added and deleted with no prblems. i am very happy with it. i might get a extreme 3 or 4 for quicker speed but this extreme 2 is excellent for quality and durability. - Ultra Ii - Sandisk - Photography - 8gb'
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