I bought this card in 2004, after I was forced to upgrade my Canon G1 to G5 (quite a sad story, basically, the G1 was stolen at the airport). I compared a couple of the choices, including the SanDisk (here). I decided on this one mainly because I have some gift certificate at Amazon. After using it for about 1.5 years, I still feel that I have made the right choice. This card is quite good.

How Fast
Even though the speed of CompactFlash cards are not essential, since most cameras cannot fully utilize faster speed (see my review here), the card speed never the less comes to play when you eventually get fed up with the slow USB1.1 port on the camera, and start to download your picture using a USB card reader. To test the speed, I bought a MediaGear 12in4 high speed card reader, and ran the SiSoft Sandra benchmark on the card. What I have found is that the card is quite balanced in terms of reading and writing speed, both clocked in at 3277 kB/sec (22x). This is in contrast to my PQI card that I recently bought (here), which is blazingly fast on reading (36x), but loses its steam on writing (14x).

Reliability
I have had this card for 1.5 years so far, and taken over 3000 shots. The card is rock solid.

Now, here is a trick that I do all the time. Every time I finish shooting, and download all the pictures to my computer, I will format the memory card. Of course, before I format, I always make another copy of all the pictures on another disk, sometimes on another computer, to make sure that I don’t lose any pictures to computer failure.

Reformatting the card, rather than deleting old pictures, has two advantages. One is quite obvious. Reformatting is much faster than deleting individual pictures. The second reason is less obvious, but more important to the health of the card. Deleting pictures will make the card storage space fragmented, just like what happens on your hard drive. And just like hard drives, such fragmentation leads to decreased performance, and higher possibility to failure.

For reformatting, remember to format it on the camera, not on the computer.

Space
You might say that this is stupid. The card is 512MB, and it is 512MB. That was what I thought for quite some time, too. Wrong! On my Canon G5, this card is reported to have only 487MB space! In comparison, my PQI card, also a 512MB (nominal), is reported to have 499MB. That is 13 MB difference, almost 3%, and room enough to squeeze in 5-6 more high quality pictures!

The space is never the less quite good. It is big enough to hold all the pictures I want to take during a 7-day vacation (>200 shots), if I pace myself. On the other hand, it will be better if you have 2 or even more cards available. Then you can go nuts (one day I went to a 7 hour event and shot 424 pictures, used up both of my memory cards. That is quite a record!)

Also, the 512MB space is quite nice that it can handily fit on a CD. That becomes handy if you use a CD to backup your shots, either with a computer, or on one of these portable gadgets such as the Disk Steno.

Niceties
The construction quality of the card is quite good. I did not appreciate this until I get something less stellar (the PQI card label was not straight!). Also, the label of the card has three lines that you can write your name and contact info on.

Recommended: Yes

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