13 Flash Memory Card Roundup: Does High Speed Really Matter?

A couple weeks ago, I was talking with a couple colleagues about DSLR cameras, and invariably the topic about high speed SD and CF memory cards came up. What we wanted to know is if a high speed memory card such as the Lexar Professional 1000x CF (Compact Flash) card will actually perform better than a SanDisk Extreme 400x CF card under typical real world conditions. When looking at the price difference between the two cards, the SanDisk Extreme 400X 32GB CF card runs for about $88 while the Lexar Professional 1000x 32GB CF card runs for about $135, that’s a difference of nearly $47!

Since testing only two memory cards seems almost wasteful, I decided to test a couple more memory cards in today’s roundup, so today we’ll be checking out the performance from 13 different memory cards from a number of different popular manufacturers such as SanDisk, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, and ADATA to see what kind of performance each memory card offers and what can be expected from some synthetic and real world testing.