Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB CF Card

Now that you can buy an APS-C camera with an 18MP resolution for a few hundred pounds, many full frame DSLRs offer over 20MP and some medium format cameras are resolving as much as 60MP, there’s a real need for large capacity media. Add into the mix high Megapixel RAW burst modes and the advent of DSLR video and there’s an equal need for speed. Sandisk soundly answer both of these needs with its Extreme Pro series which are available in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

I tested the 64GB version with Canon’s excellent 7D and Nikon’s legendary D3s. It performed flawlessly with both, enabling me to make the most of the former’s stunning HD video capture and the latter’s impressive continuous high speed stills shooting of 9FPS. That’s because, in addition to being UDMA 6 enabled, the Extreme Pro uses two performance enhancing technologies invented by SanDisk – ‘POWER CORE CONTROLLER’ & ‘ENHANCED SUPER-PARALLEL PROCESSING “ESP”, resulting in a blisteringly fast write speed of 90MB/s and the best sustained data transfer rate I have seen in any CF card I’ve used to date.

Doing the maths, 12 minutes of video footage shot on a Canon 7D (or 5D) takes up 4GB, giving this card the capacity to record over 3 hours of video. Get a pair (and some spare batteries) and you’ll be able to shoot for almost an entire day, though it’s unlikely you’ll need to. Certainly I never exceeded the 64GB capacity on any video shoot with the 7D, or, for that matter, on any stills shoot, though during one heroic shoot, with the Nikon D3s, (which involved numerous 5 shot HDRs) I did manage to capture as much as 40GB of data. Being able to do so without having to worry about how many shots I had left, chimp, change card, format and then worry whether I’d formatted the wrong card, was a liberating experience that allowed me to concentrate on the technical and creative aspects of my shoot.

Of course, when you’re dealing with such large amounts of data, transfer speed becomes of vital importance and the Extreme Pro delivers on this front too, especially when used with SanDisk’s Extreme Firewire Reader.

If you really want to take advantage of everything the latest generation of DSLRs have to offer, these Sandisk Extreme Pro cards are unbeatable. They have the speed, they have the capacity and being Sandisk, they also have the reliability. If you are photographing sports/action, shooting video and/or shooting with high megapixel DSLRs/digital medium format cameras, the 64GB Extreme Pro is the card for you.

More info: www.sandisk.co.uk

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