Bexlee

Prices vary dramatically. Cheapies seem to be brands like Viking, & others I can't remember the name of. Is the pricing difference just down to branding, or is there a discernible difference in quality?

gregh

no, there is a difference in write speed. My m8 got an Ixus 3 recently and he boiled it down to 2 CF cards that actually supported the write speed needed for video.

greg

ChrisB

Sandisk and Lexar do what I'd call premium cards - high capacity, ultra quick writing speeds.

Lexar do a very tasty 4GB CF card (Type II).

alistair

There are differences - quite large ones actually.

Unfortunately, the differences do not appear to be uniform - different brands perform better on different hardware, so unless you're in a position to test them back to back then you need to decide what's important.

For me it was write speed as my camera has 3 frames per second which I use occasionally - even then I just fill up the buffer of 8 and have to wait cor the CF card to catch up. I bought a couple of Sandisk Ultra 512's, but then read this and would have bought Pretec 640's instead !

Got mine from Value Media who were cheap & efficient.

Also if you have a laptop, a PCMCIA CF reader is a good investment - one les cable to carry around & you can view your pictures on a decent screen relatively quickly.

Bexlee

Thanks guys

So what is the difference between 'Type I' and 'Type II' ?

alistair

Thickness !

The original CF Type I is 3.3mm thick, and the newer CF Type II is a little chunkier at about 5mm.

Some cameras will only take a Type I, others will take both.