Hate your digital camera? Check the flash memory card! Before you blame your digital camera because it takes too long between shots or corrupts your images, pop out the old card, and see what speed it is. It's not just about capacity; you also have a need for speed! What good is having a gigabyte, if it takes a giga-year to transfer files? More importantly, if your card is too slow, your camera will take a long time to save pictures between shots. Worse case, your camera might not have enough time to save a picture, and it may freeze or write a partial image. It might even corrupt other images in the process. The latter happened to me. While it could have been a flaw with my camera, since upgrading to the PQI 1GB 133x Secure Digital card, after six months of use, I haven’t had a single problem.


Slow Cards, Keep Write

Your camera operates only as fast as the memory card within it. (If your camera is older than your memory card, reverse that, get a new camera, then come back and re-read this review!) Our camera wasn’t high-end, but it was new enough to have problems with our old SD cards. In addition to corrupting images, it locked up when shooting short movies. It recorded about two seconds then stopped which made that function unusable.


Hype or Hyper?

There really is a difference in memory card speeds. In Secure Digital world, the speed 133x is based on a manufacturer specification. Here, 133x is supported by v1.1 of the SD card spec. That means this card can support transfer speeds of up to 20 megabytes /sec. That’s compared to the ‘standard’ speeds up to 3.0 MB/sec. (Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card ) Just note that as ‘x’ goes up, the faster a card can transfer data if your hardware supports it.


PQI 1GB 133x

Our PQI 133x SD card is great. It has an easily movable write-locking slider. It fits perfectly in both of our SD cameras, and it works very well. I can take many quick-frame shots, and even 30 frames-per-second movies with no issues. I also use the card with my SanDisk SD card reader. When plugged into a USB 2.0 device, it reads and writes faster than any other memory card I have. It even transfers data to the computer faster than the camera when plugged in directly. Finally, the card is durable. It’s been dropped many times, and I have yet to clean the contacts. There are smudges on the back, but it still works great. It also comes in a handy little plastic locking container.


Conclusion

If it’s faster to draw a scene by hand than wait between camera shots, upgrade your memory card. At around $30, get this card. I also highly recommend it for non-camera use in card readers as well. The PQI 133x SD memory card is cheap, dependable, durable, and fast. What more could you ask for?



(L&M Challenge: 499)

Recommended: Yes