Customer Reviews

Kingston Elite Pro 16 GB 133x CompactFlash Memory Card CF/16GB-S2

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

I bought this as a backup for my upcoming week long trip that I don't want to bring along the laptop.Also partly to satisfy my curiosity as to how much I can get away with for the cheap price of this one. I bet my luck partly on the Kingston pro reputation. Well, I was quite a bit disappointed.

Just tested it on 40D high speed continuous shooting in RAW, also tested are 4GB SanDisk Extreme III, 4GB Ultra II/15ms, 4GB Ultra II regular, 8GB Transcend x133. Of course, Extreme III is the fastest. but this Kingston is the slowest, to my surprise. Because the Transcend x133 did better than the Ultra II regular, so I was expecting the same for this Kingston. Not so. Also, when I tried "Erase All" on all these cards, Kingston also comes last, by quite a bit. To be fair, Extreme III isn't that great with burst RAW shooting either - once the initial burst is completed (camera buffer filled), the recovery speed is only acceptable - a little wait, then I can do 4-5 continuous shots, then a small wait again. But the other cards basically all take forever to complete the writing - the difference is between longer forever vs slightly shorter ones. That makes wonder how people use 1Ds. 40D only got 10MB after all. Then again, people lived with 34/36 frame films for a long time before the digitals. So what do I know :)

I sorta expected to be on par with the Transcend x133, but turns out, Transcend is quite a bit faster in both read and write. Hey, I still got a 16GB for the price of 8GB, didn't I? :)

Bottom line, this card is definitely slow. But perfectly usable if you are not in a hurry. And from what I've heard, Kingston got a pretty good reputation. But if I were to do this again, I probably would have opted for the Extreme III 8GB than this one, they are about the same price right now.

P.S. Now I found a great use for this card - on my 5D! 5D's super slow processor is a great match to this card. I tested 5D with this and Sandisk Extreme III, no difference. Once the camera buffer is full, nothing in the world is gonna help. So now this card sits in my 5D and does a great service for me. Not wasted after all. The only thing is, don't try to fill the buffer on 5D, you'll regret if you do :). For those who got 5D MkII, this card's usefulness is perhaps open to question...

I bought this CF card for the sole purpose of replacing my iPod Mini's 4GB microdrive.

It worked right out of the box. Now I got 16GB inside my iPod and turned my Mini into a flash based player now.

Been a slow device and without constant writes (like a DSLR), I don't know how this card stands against the competition. Since, for my DSLR I get known brands and speedy cards, even if they cost much more.

If you want something cheap and don't plan on using them on middle to high-end products that depend on speedy writes this will fit your device just nicely.

This is definitely not the fastest chip around however if you need a reliable chip that has lots of room this definitely fits the ticket.

I have used this chip w/ a Canon 40 D capturing High Quality JPEGS and also RAW. When shooting JPEGS I have not had an issue w/ speed. When shooting action shots in RAW it does tend to lag a bit. However for my typical use it works just fine.

For over 2 months it has been the main chip I shoot with and has had a lot of use (probably over 6,000 shots in total.) I have not experienced any problems with the reliability of this chip.

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Update 06/07/2010

I have been using this chip for over a year and a half. It is one of two 16GB chips that I use so it gets a lot of use. I have used it in my Canons (20D, 40D and 7D). I have never had this chip fail me.

Yes it is a slower chip so if I'm shooting RAW I move to a faster chip. But for general use when I'm not needing a fast chip this is great.

After receiving this product, I formatted it in my Canon 30D, and began taking pictures, about 10% of all pictures were corrupted, and after a few minutes of shooting, I would receive an error telling me "There is a problem with this CF"

I've never had problems with my camera before, and I've never had problems like this with flash in any camera before.

The card seems like a good deal on a capacity/price basis but seems to have problems working with the Nikon D300. I bought it because I don't tend to need a lot of speed from my CF card but having more room so I can shoot RAW or uncompressed TIFF was appealing. The camera starting reporting "Bad Format" problems with the card during the first couple of days of use. I have not had that problem with any other card in that same camera. Given that I can't risk having my CF card stop working mid-shoot, this card was sent back to Amazon immediately for a refund. I would not recommend it for use with Nikon SLR given that experience.

I used this CF card for the first time with Nikon D300. I first formatted it in the camera. After saving about 25 pictures (both on RAW and JPEG) over 5 days, the camera suddenly flashed the message "CF Card not formatted" and the pictures were no longer visible (they were visible earlier). I had to reformat the card and lost all the pictures taken. This was shocking as had this happened after few hundered photographs, I would have lost all my work. After reformatting it is working again, but I have no idea as to why it happend in the first place.

I just bought this memory card. On my first use it stopped working telling me CF Error. all my valuable pictures I took of my trip to New York were deleted.

I bought this card because capacity wise its a great deal. It even worked great for a long time but after a trip to new york with more then 800 shots on the card it completely failed. Lucky for me with the use of data recovery software I was able to recovery most of the shots. Right after I recovered the shots the card became so badly broken that it would not even be recognized in Mac or Win and I could not reformat everytime I tried I just got an error.

I would NOT buy memory cards from kingston again after this. I have had much less problems with an absolute no name brand ( I mean my other 16GB CF card literally does not list a brand at all... ) Avoid this card!

This card was great in my Nikon D700 for a couple of days. It then started malfunctioning after the first 100+ images were taken. It would begin working again after turning the camera on and off, but it would soon break again. Formatting the card in the camera didn't help. I have many other Kingston SD cards that have all functioned without fail, but this CF card just didn't work.

I used it with a Nikon D300, and found it to be unreliable.

On my initial tests, it woul not handle well the burst rate of the camera, giving an error of data corruption. I was able to continue using the card by creating a new folder each time the card would give that error.

Lately, it started to have a much bigger problem: Gives an unrecoverable error where I loose all the photos, without any reason, and the only solution is to reformat.

I guess the card may work better with cameras with less megapixels, or with jpeg files. But for RAW on a Nikon D300, it's complete crap. And very slow too, when trying to see the photos or access the menus.