Hi Folks, heads up on a non-photo orientated but precise Cf card review for your high end Digital backs or high frame rate D-SLRs:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/compactflash...view-31541.html

Enjoy

Ed

Note these results are not consistent with Rob Galbraith's tests with specific cameras. For example, on a Nikon D3, the Kingston cards are well down the list:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/camera_mu...p?cid=6007-9255

One problem is that performance can degrade suddenly after data has been written to the card, per the discussions of SSD Drives. I've had CF cards that would write at 6 mb/second the first day, then eventually drop to about 250 kb/second using WinXP, even when several GB free space is available. Those were SanDisk cards.

What I get from both is that SanDisk and Lexar pro are both consistently in the high reaches of the list...

I recently got a 50D with UDMA support for CF cards, so I have been through this recently. I go the Sandisk Extreme IV, UDMA. There is an Extreme IV that doesn't support UDMA, so watch out for that.

I have a few observations about the process of getting the most from your flash cards.

1) you may need to replace your card readers to support the new UDMA protocols. Without a UDMA reader, you will be limited to something in the low 15MB per second range. This one is cheap, small and very good.

2) I have a cheap USB expansion card in my PC. It was a bottleneck with my UDMA cards. I needed to plug into the USB port on the motherboard.

3) I have a RAID 1 system (redundancy) and its write speed is slower than the CF card reader, so I don't get the full benefit of the speed.

4) My old PC Card CF adapter, when coupled with my UDMA card, crashes my Vista laptop.