Over recent years, prices on compact flash cards have been going down, capacities have been going up, and the reliability of Sandisk, Lexar, Kingston, and Transcend compact flash cards have all more or less stabilized. It is much less common these days to experience a card failure. In fact, we often never even think about it happening. I just had 2 cards fail though, and which came as a surprise, but I will discuss that issue further in a minute. First I want to talk more about what to look for when buying a compact flash card.
I use only cards with 120 megabytes per second minimum transfer speeds and I used to buy strictly Sandisk brand cards, but a couple of years ago I switched over to buying mainly Lexar brand cards because they started offering UDMA 7 high-speed CF cards with transfer speeds also up to 120 megabytes per second and for a considerably lower cost than the Sandisk cards at this speed.
Sandisk and Lexar both now make what are known as “Professional” level CF cards designed to withstand situations of extreme heat, cold, dust and dirt, drops, and etc. So I feel comfortable with either brand at this point.
Note though that transfer speeds will depend also upon the type of card reader you are using. If you use a low budget card reader with slow transfer speeds then you may never realize transfer speeds on files of up 120MB/s from the card to your computer even though the card offers those speeds.
Thus, a couple of years ago I also switched to using a very good card reader made by PixelFlash which has “No-Bend” pin technology. This avoids the connection pins inside the card reader from bending or breaking off which often occurs with many of the inexpensive card readers.
The PixelFlash reader is also a USB 3.0 card reader. So transfer speeds are very fast. If you are using a typical USB 2.0 card reader than you will only be able to transfer at 60 megabytes per second even if the card offers 120 megabytes per second speeds. USB 3.0 card readers can transfer up to 640 megabytes per second. So they can take full advantage of the card’s maximum 120mb transfer speed.
Also, most newer cards are using the UDMA 7 technology I mentioned above and so if the card reader is not specifically designed to support UDMA 7 then it is possible that the card reader can cause the card to develop bad sectors and eventually fail over time. So it is best to avoid a low quality card reader all together, especially with the newer cards. But the PixelFlash card reader is designed to support UDMA 7 cards so it is great in that sense too.
Back to the flash cards though. In terms of cost, recently Sandisk prices have come down a lot to nearly match Lexar’s historically lower pricing points and thus, I started buying Sandisk cards again even though they still cost a little bit more than Lexar. The reason being that write speeds, often not discussed as openly by the flash card manufacturers, are a lot faster now on Sandisk cards and even more important than transfer speeds.
This is because the write speeds will have some effect on how many photos you can actually capture in a burst of continuous shooting if your camera has only a small buffer. And write speeds are becoming increasingly more important as more people are shooting HD video with DSLR cameras now which requires the use of faster card write speeds to be able to capture 1080 video resolution.
On the most recent Sandisk card I purchased, which is a Sandisk Extreme 32GB CF card, the write speed is up to 85 megabytes per second. On the equivalent Lexar Professional 800 32GB CF card the write speed is only about half that of a Sandisk Extreme card, reaching only up to 45 megabytes per second. So at the moment I prefer to spend another $10 for a Sandisk card to get nearly double the write speed. But that price versus transfer and write speed matrix could change over time (as it often does) and Lexar may again start offering faster transfer and write speed cards at lower prices than Sandisk in the future. Time will tell though of course.
Also, card capacities keep going up as time goes on and topping out at about 128GB on most brands at present. I continue to use cards of no more than 32GB though for the simple reason that if one of a number of smaller cards fails on a photo shoot then I don’t risk losing as many shots from the shoot as I would if I have all my photos on one higher capacity card. In fact, if you really want to be safe, then 16GB cards are the best in order to avoid ever having too much content stored on one single card. A 16GB card will still capture about 500 RAW files when shooting with a 21-22MP DSLR camera, which is quite a bit. A 32GB card should give you a bit more than 1,000 RAW files on a single card. If you have only say a 16MP camera though then you will likely be able to capture even more RAW files than 500 on a 16GB card. At the moment I have two 16GB and two 32GB cards that I am shooting with. These four cards can capture a bit over 3,000 RAW frames in total on either a Canon 5D Mark II or Mark III camera. This pretty much provides me with enough storage for any type of photo shoot I may have. Multiple cards also allows me to separate the files from different segments of a shoot which can be quite useful as well.
I also mentioned the Kingston and Transcend brands. They make decent quality cards as well and I have used them in the past too. But at the moment Kingston’s equivalent card, the Kingston Ultimate 600X CF card, transfers at only 90MB/s and costs more than both the Sandisk and Lexar 120MB/s transfer speed cards. So they aren’t a good value at all. Transcend has a 32GB 800X CF card which transfers at 120MB and writes a little bit faster than the Lexar card at up to 60MB/s, which is good. But I haven’t bought a Transcend card in the last 4-5 years to be able to say how good they are. But basically all of these 32GB CF cards are in the $35-$45 price range at the moment.
Now, getting back to my card failures, all the brands seem to offer limited lifetime warranties on their cards (limited to card defects and failures not attributed to physical misuse of the card), but I haven’t had a card failure in years. So I hadn’t really been so concerned with warranties or customer support from any of the brands for a long time.
But recently I had both a Sandisk and a Lexar card fail right around the same time and I would say in terms of customer support and warranty coverage that Lexar is truly the winner over Sandisk in this category.
I contacted Lexar through their support email address at [email protected] and within 1 day they had already made arrangements with me to return the defective card to them for a free replacement. They were extremely polite and accommodating and even sent out the replacement card to me before receiving the faulty card back from me so that I would not have to be without my memory card for longer than necessary.
Sandisk on the other hand has provided terrible support so far. Their support is nonexistent in fact. I wrote to them about the failed card 10 days ago to their customer support email address at [email protected] and have received no reply from them at all. I wrote to them again 3 days ago and still no response from them on my request for product support. You would think as the largest manufacturer of flash memory in the world that they would offer better customer service, but apparently not.
So there you have it and, when deciding which card to buy, you should consider not only price, but transfer speed, write speed, warranty, and support service track records.
You can also click on the links below to see which cards I would recommend from each of the 3 main manufactures that are offering 120MB/s transfer speed UDMA 7 CF cards at this time.
Bear in mind, these are not necessarily the top of the line, highest capacity, or fastest cards available from each of the 3 brands, but these are the card models I feel have the best balance of cost versus speed:
1 – Lexar Professional 800x 32GB Compact Flash Memory Card
2 – SanDisk Extreme 32GB Compact Flash Memory Card UDMA 7
3 – Transcend 32 GB 800X Compact Flash Memory Card
If you have any questions on Compact Flash cards please free to post them below.
*UPDATE #1 / 18-November-17* I just posted a new article on Memory Card Speeds Needed For 4K Video and my recommendations on the best cards for shooting 4K video. Go here to read my new article.
I can’t speak for SanDisk, Mark – I only have 2 or 3 of them that were supplied with some of my cameras. However, I did have a CD card from Lexar that failed, so I emailed B&H about it and forwarded the card back to them. And to my astonishment, I received a replacement card before the defective one could possibly have arrived in NY from where I live, in Australia.
BTW – I use a Lexar card reader – haven’t seen the PixelFlash on sale here.
Agreed. I shot with SanDisk professionally for years with a gov Ernest agency where we shoot critically important images in a variety of conditions. Anyways, our Imaging Unit cycled out bad cards so I never really had a problem with SanDisk. Like driving a certain brand auto that’s new, leased and in your company fleet and swapped every six months; you don’t see problems until down the road.
Last year I was in northern Finland to shoot them Aurora, and had a SanDisk critical failure, out of the blue and for no obvious reason. Suffice it to say I take great care of my kit, and this was a shocker not to mention inconvenient. SanDisk was unconcerned with my story.
Last month I was touring Zion National Park; after a morning of getting hard to get shots, I fumbled a card and it went into water for like five seconds. Images gone, tried. Passive air drying, putting card in a bag of rice to dry, c impressed air and then recovery software.
I contacted SanDisk ang they gave me the corporate heave-ho; not our fault, read the fine print, buy some recovery software and good luck. I get it; it was my error, but I’ve bought thousands of dollars of thei product over the years, encouraged students to do the same, and this was their customer service….,
I recently learned from a supplier that while no cards are waterproof, some are better than others and that the FBI used Lexar and was able to recover lots of evidence on cards damaged by. Katrina. Lexar reportedly has better recovery software than SanDisk, so Lexar it is for me and everyone I speak to from here on in it is.
Thank you for your input Mark and sorry to hear about your woes with losing your valuable pictures. Does your camera have two card slots where you could record everything in duplicate? If so that would prevent any of these types of failures or loss of pictures in the future. For that reason alone it might be good to invest in a body that has a dual card slot. I used to shoot with a Canon 1DS which had a dual card slot which is great. At the moment I am using a Canon 5D Mark II which only has a single card slot, and thankfully I haven’t had any card failures while shooting in the last 5 years, but I will be getting a new body within the next couple of months and switching back to a dual card slot body.
Also, which model Sandisk cards were you using? Ultra, Extreme? Because my camera only has 1 card slot at the moment, I have always used the top of the range cards to help reduce the risk of one failing on a shoot and losing pictures.
Another thing that I discourage is connecting the card to a computer to copy or delete files off of the card and then putting it back into the camera to continue shooting. It is better to finish shooting with the card before you start transferring photos from the card to a computer. Then after you complete the transfer, reformat the card with the camera before you start shooting again to reduce the risk of failures.
Another thing I do is, if I have a 2-3 day shoot for example, I switch to using a new card each day of the shoot. This prevents the possibility of losing any work from the previous days if the card fails after the first day of shooting. Another reason I don’t bother with cards above 32GB. I rather have multiple 32GB cards and keep switching them to spread the risk of data loss to not having all my images on one card if it fails.
Out of coincidence, I just had 2 of my Sandisk Micro SD cards that I use for portable devices fail. I just contacted Sandisk for the first time in many years for warranty service and it seems after a couple of emails back and forth that they will be replacing the cards. One card has a lifetime warranty and the other card has a 5 year warranty which expires in 2019. But things are not moving nearly as quickly or in as personal of a way with Sandisk on getting them replaced as things did when I needed warranty service from Lexar. On the other hand, Lexar refused to ship my replacement card to me outside of the USA and so I had to have it shipped to someone in the USA first and then have them forward the card to me. If Sandisk is willing to ship the replacement cards directly to me overseas then that certainly is a benefit to using Sandisk. Let’s see what happens on this warranty replacement. I will keep this discussion updated.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I could have had an SD card in that day, it was the one time I did not. On photo trips I bring enough cards so I have one card per day. Each card is downloaded at the end of the day onto my MacBook in the hotel, and I then back that up on both the cloud and on a rugged external hard drive. I do not format the cards with all this backup until I’m home and I am 100% sure everything is secure. I was shooting with the SanDisk Extreme. I appreciate your experience with Lexar and your support of SanDisc but fact is that SanDisc didn’t really go the distance to help; they offered a vague finger point towards some software options. I was looking for better.
Your welcome and understood Mark. I am not sure SanDisc could have actually done much more to help retrieve your data when you dropped the card in water and physically damaged it. Perhaps it was not possible to retrieve it at that point. It seems like you are doing everything right though otherwise with your storage methods and taking good care. The only sad thing is you didn’t have a backup card in the camera at the time, which it sounds like you could have.
As for SanDisc on my recent card failure problems, I am now awaiting for my 2 replacement cards to come back from them. I am actually quite pleased with them so far. I am in Thailand and they had me mail the 2 failed cards to Hong Kong instead of to the USA. Less postage cost and faster on delivery.
On one of the cards I told them there was still some personal data on the card, but that I could not format the card to remove the data. They said I could cut the card in half before returning it to protect my data and so that is what I did. That was very nice of them to offer.
They are also mailing the replacement cards back to me directly in Thailand. Lexar wouldn’t do that when I had the card failure with them. As I mentioned, I had to have it shipped to someone in the USA first, which cost was more time and postage. Personally, I think personally I will continue to use SanDisc cards in the future because (having had failures and dealings with both companies on warranty replacement) I now know if I have another card failure that getting replacement in Asia will not be a problem. If you are based in the USA though then you have the option of getting replacements from Lexar directly.
Maybe in your case you might like to choose Lexar cards instead. But bear in mind if a card is physically damaged it may not be possible to retrieve data from a card, no matter which manufacturer you buy from. Best wishes.
That’s weird. Typically, modern electronics (assuming they are not powered up at the time) aren’t affected at all by getting wet unless they spend more than a few minutes in salt water without getting thoroughly rinsed quickly enough (corrosion). The card should have started working once it dried out. I mean, PCBs are epoxy these days, so they don’t swell, paper capacitors are a thing of the past… pretty much all the truly water-sensitive stuff hasn’t been around for decades.
With that said, it sounds like you didn’t wait long enough. IMO, the absolute minimum time you should wait before trying to power up wet electronics is a week. Otherwise, you risk causing damage by powering up circuitry that still has water shorting out various parts of it. There really are no shortcuts. Compressed air won’t reach inside the packaging, and rice and/or desiccant packets can only get the moisture level in the air so low, beyond which you can’t speed up evaporation much except through heat, and even then, only to a point.
If you still have the card, it is probably dry by now. Try it again. If that doesn’t work, there’s probably a blown fuse involved. Either that or the contacts are dirty. Hit it with some contact cleaner, let it dry for a few hours (it evaporates very quickly), and try again.