SanDisk Extreme III 4 GB CompactFlash Memory Card SDCFX3-004G-A31
by SanDisk
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of SanDisk Extreme III 4 GB CompactFlash Memory Card SDCFX3-004G-A31
Customer Review: When GETTING your photos matters most
Summary: 5 Stars
Think about it. After spending $15,000 for a trip would you take your rolls of 35mm or APS film to the nearest corner drug store for 15 minute developing? Of course not. You would seek out the best lab in your area and explain which rolls need push processing because the flash couldn't light up enough and you'd talk to a lab chemist who would develop your photos for you. You might have a CD/DVD burned of the scans for the final touch at home, and it might cost $400 to get your film processed, but no scratches, and most importantly NO PROBLEMS.
The same holds true for large and fast memory cards. When you get to 4GB and up or 130x and up speeds, problems creep in. Will the 130x card have such a fast risetime at cold temperatures that you miss your photos on Mt. Everest? (CMOS speeds up at cold and has a ringing problem as a result). Do you have a $260,000 Thermotron environmental chamber to test your memory card at temperature and altitude before leaving on your trip? NO? Then just buy the best.
And this is the best. I had a 4GB transcend memory card. I thought I was set - I bought Amazon's Wolverine MP3/video/CF/SD reader with the 80GB user upgradable disk. All my SanDisk cards transferred flawlessly - but my "TRANSCEND" 4GB 130x card DID NOT - it locked up the Wolverine. It worked in the camera. It worked in my desktop replacement laptop (dell 1705) but it didn't work in my pocket mp3 player and card depository so I can keep on shooting without lugging the laptop with me.
This was a major issue - the wolverine was pricewise comparable with the ipod yet had SO many more features and a much larger LCD, not to mention the 2 card slots and muticard compatibility, long battery life, etc. Loosing the ability to dump the 4GB card to it was a major issue with a multimegapixel camera that can write the card so long as you hold the shutter down!
I switched and bought this card - the 4GB Extreme III which came with about $50 in software for recovery of lost data (believe me that is well worth it when you lost your Everest pictures and the camera can preview them on the card, but your pc can not transfer them at all!). The Wolverine yanks the photos out of the 4GB card like any other 1GB card and saves them to disk, even lets you preview the CF/SD cards before doing the disk transfer. And fast too.
Inside the camera (with the high speed card upgrade) write times are flawlessly fast - hold down the button in raw mode and the pictures just stream to the card. For reading, I must admit I did comprimise since I have 2 laptops - one with an integral 7 in 1 reader - this one (the dell 1705) doesn't have a CF or a PCMCIA so I got the USB $9.50 fry's special reader. It works fine - and equally fast to my laptop with the builtin (alienware).
This will be my PRIMARY CF card - I have a couple 1 GB cards for other camera backs, but the Extreme III is just so fast the camera flys. A note of caution - NONE of this is of value unless your CAMERA supports high speed writes (and preferably reads). High speed means different things to different people. We are talking about 20 MB/s (Yea - megaBYTES) or 133 x (133 X 150 Kbps). Without these write abilities in your camera, the card will work, but your money may be better spent unles an upgrade is in your future.
Enjoy digital. Be thankful searching for a lab to process those sealed rolls of film is gone now.
Customer Review: Lightning Speed For Your Digital SLR Camera
Summary: 5 Stars
SanDisk is known as a reliable name in flash memory cards. I have purchased SanDisk memory cards for years and have never had any of them fail on me. So when I recently purchased a new Canon EOS 40D digital SLR camera, I knew that I wanted a SanDisk CompactFlash card, to record all of my precious photos. I looked up the specs of the many choices that SanDisk offers. I also read many reviews, right here on Amazon, and decided that the Extreme III series CompactFlash was what I needed.
Wanting the ability to store several hundred photos on a single card, I chose the 4GB Extreme III CompactFlash card. I inserted the 4GB Extreme III into my new digital SLR camera and formatted it. At 10.1 megapixels, and at the largest JPG setting, my camera shows that the card will hold roughly 900 pictures. I began snapping pictures and was instantly amazed at how quickly the data saved to the card. After I had about 50 pictures on the card, I removed it from the camera and inserted it into the card reader attached to my PC. I copied all of the photos from the card onto my PC hard drive. Again I am amazed at how quickly this memory card can move data. This card is awesome! I have always thought that the many claims of faster speed in memory cards was purely hype, to get consumers to plunk down extra cash. Well I can honestly tell you that there IS a difference. Compaired to an older 512 MB CompactFlash card that I use in a different camera, this Extreme III series card is at least 2 to 3 times faster in transferring digital photos.
I have noticed a few low scoring reviews, here on Amazon, from people that have had their SanDisk memory cards fail. I am sorry to hear that others have not had as much luck with their SanDisk cards as I have. I suppose there is always going to be a certain amount of failure with any electronic device on the market. All I can say is that I have been using SanDisk flash memory devices for years, including SD, Memory Stick Pro, MicroSD (transflash), CompactFlash, and even several different Cruzer USB flash drives, and have never had one case of failure. I have worked in the I.T. field for over 20 years and I can asure you that I am not a light user by any means. Any data storage media I own is used frequenty and intensly. In my book there is no better manuafacturer of portable memory media than SanDisk, and I will remain a loyal user until they decide to cut back on quality and I start to experience failures and lost data.
I highly recommend this Extreme III series CompactFlash card by SanDisk. I also recommend that you purchase it from Amazon. I made the mistake of buying mine from a local electronics store, which charged me nearly twice the price of what Amazon is selling it for. I was in a hurry and needed it right away, and boy did I pay a premium! Amazon has a great price on this excellent memroy card, and their return policy and customer service are top notch.
Customer Review: SanDisk Extreme III's are Excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
I have several SanDisk Extreme III compact flash cards: 2Gig and 4Gig cards. I've never had a problem with any of them, and they are fast, not only to write to (if you have a camera that can write a lot in a burst, as I do, both a Canon 30D and a Canon 40D) but it's also really fast to copy your pictures off of these cards to a PC, especially if your PC's reader can process them quickly! On my 30D and 40D cameras, I save both the large JPG and the RAW files to the SanDisk cards, and I can shoot in the mode that will take many per second, and these cards have always been able to keep up with the cameras. I will only use these. I have shot in temperatures from 110 degrees F and in places below -10 degrees F with these cards, and I have never a problem with the cards.
You have to be careful, though, as once I bought one of these from an online auction place, for a price that was too good to be true, and it turned out to look like a real one, but it was a knock off. It was not as fast as the real thing (it didn't have a serial number on it, but other than the missing serial number, it looked real). So, buyer beware. I returned it to the seller who was on the other side of the world from me. Cards sold directly from Amazon have never been a problem for me - I buy cameras and camera components all the time from Amazon, and have always been happy with each purchase.
Update: December 2008 - I just added a SanDisk 8GB Extreme III CF Card to my inventory and I could not be happier. Works great and keeps up with my Canon EOS 30D and my Canon EOS 40D.
Customer Review: You get what you pay for, and this one is worth it.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this flash card to revive my Palm LifeDrive, whose internal Hitachi MicroDrive had died, with the telltale clicking death rattle.
It turns out that MicroDrives and CompactFlash cards plug into the same socket.
Ordinarily, this procedure will void your warranty, but my LifeDrive was already long beyond that, so I had nothing to lose.
So, carefully following the instructions on some PalmOne forums, I disassembled the LD, removed the dead MicroDrive, installed the operating system image on this CompactFlash card, plugged it in, then reassembled the LD.
I charged the battery, which had already long been run down as a consequence of the death rattling drive, then turned it on.
Within a minute, I had completely brought the LD back to life, resurrection, if you will.
Not only that, but this little repair actually makes the LD significantly better than when I bought it new.
I now get about twice the battery life as before; the access the CompactFlash is so much faster than the sluggish MicroDrive; it shaves a few grams of weight off the LD; and it is also far more shock resistant.
This card is a bit more expensive than most generic CF cards, but you get better transfer speeds, plus this card is designed to be weather resistant, which would be helpful with my LD, since I carry it in my shirt breast pocket, and perspiration can cause problems with less durable components.
The card arrived within a week after I ordered it, which turned out to be a full week less than estimated.
Excellent!
Customer Review: For Specific Needs
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought it to use in Nikon D300 while photographing horse shows. The write speed of 30 mg/sec is the same as the Sandisk Ultra (not the Sandisk Ultra II which confusingly is 15 mg/sec). I compared the 2 just to make sure there wasn't an edge and at least on my camera there is not in terms of shooting speed - your camera might write faster so you'll have to figure that out yourself. As to the Extreme part, I haven't tested it all that hard yet so I can't say whether it holds up better than the Ultras - I've dropped it in its case on cement and shot in 40 degree whether, but those are not the challenges it claims to overcome and I have done the same with my ultras. So, so far it works fine but for me not worth the extra money yet.
Cheapo part that reduced star rating: It does come with the software for recovering deleted images. I am pretty careful so I haven't had to try it yet, but they make it so it is pretty unlikely you will ever get the software. You can download it, but it won't work until you use it the first time at which point you have to enter a 16 digit key, which you didn't think you needed because it was already downloaded; you likely don't have it any more at that point. So don't make your decision based on that, unless you remember to immediately use it when you still have the code and see how it works. Come on Sandisk, you are a better company than that -- if you say your giving us the software, give us the software.