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(More customer reviews)I am upgrading from A-DATA 16GB Turbo 150X Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) Class 6 Memory Card - Retail Package using a Pentax K200D 10.2MP Digital SLR Camera with Shake Reduction (Body Only). The increase in performance is obvious from the first picture taken. RAW pictures are written to the card in less than a second. The camera does not hesitate due to the card when taking photos in RAW mode unless they are truly "rapid fire" photographs. This card writes RAW images as fast as the old card wrote JPEG files. In JPEG mode, the card speed doesn't become an issue until many (8+) rapid fire pictures are taken. In both cases, the camera flushes all pictures in around 3 seconds. The old card would take 15 seconds to flush the camera.
This card isn't cheap, but I can totally recommend it. It is both fast and large (over 1900 RAW pics, I would guess 5,000 JPEG pics). I totally believe in RAW. What is the point of the $1500 zoom or $500 prime lens if the detail is never saved to memory? RAW gives you far more editing and photo recovery options than JPEG. Taking JPEG photos with a cheap card is like putting a cheap non-coated UV filter on your expensive lens. Take a laptop/netbook and something like HP SimpleSave 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive HPBAAD0020HBK-NHSN (Gloss Black) and you are all set to take as many RAW pictures as you want.
Update May 13, 2010: Upgraded to Pentax K-7 14.6 MP Digital SLR with Shake Reduction and 720p HD Video (Body Only) camera. This card provides benefits over the lesser A-data cards, namely an extended RAW burst mode. Camera can capture roughly 1300 RAW or roughly twice as many in the best JPEG mode. In raw mode, camera took 15 pictures in full burst mode, then took 5 pictures in roughly 3-4 fps, and then was able to take pictures continuously at 2 frames per second (in RAW, with full memory). Camera took 10 seconds to write the buffer to the card. In comparison, the A-data card took 14 pictures in full burst mode, and then slowed down to approximately 0.66 fps (or 2 frames in approximately 3 seconds). It took about 15 seconds to write the buffer to the card. If you take fast action photos, this card in the Pentax K7 essentially gives you an extended burst mode feature. When shooting video, this card gives a similar speed increase when flushing the recording due to pause, which can be essential if you need to rapidly start it back unexpectedly. I have a second one of these cards on order.
I also have a point and shoot class Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 12.1 MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch LCD (Black), and this card provides little benefit for this camera. The JPEG files it writes are less than 5MB so the extra speed isn't noticed. The AVCHD encoding removes the need for speed when shooting HD video. I use A-DATA 32 GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card 32GSDHC6 (Blue) with this camera with no issues. You won't be happy if you put it in your SLR and try to shoot raw or record MPEG encoded HD video, as the K7 does. The A-Data 32GB card is actually slower than the 16GB A-data card referenced at the beginning of this review. For .JPEG cameras which have AVCHD capability, the A-DATA 32GB card is a cheap alternative with generous storage capacity (over 6000 pictures on largest and finest picture mode, or over 4 hours of HD video at maximum resolution and quality).
Tip for maintaining memory card speed: Once you have copied all the photos from your card to your computer or storage device, format the card in the camera you are going to use it in using the camera menus. This provides two benefits: all fragmentation is eliminated because you are starting out with a brand new file system with no data in it (filesystems with all files deleted can still suffer from directory and file allocation table fragmentation). Secondly, the camera will optimize the file system parameters (such a sector size) to work the most effectively for that camera. The SD card may take longer to copy to the computer, but that is OK: the important thing is to be able to have top performance in the camera. In-computer performance may be traded off for faster camera performance.
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SanDisk Extreme III - Flash memory card - 32 GB - Class 10 - SDHCWith 30MB/s read/write speeds, you'll see it takes more than a great digital SLR camera to bring your ideas to life. Get exactly the shots you want with the professional-grade responsiveness of SanDisk Extreme® SDHC cards. You'll have room to capture it all in RAW+JPEG, and save the editing for later. Plus, you'll get faster photo and video transfers from camera to computer.
Click here for more information about SanDisk Extreme III - Flash memory card - 32 GB - Class 10 - SDHC
