Customer Reviews

SanDisk 128 MB CompactFlash Card

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

About a year ago, I purchased a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. The "wimpy" 8 MB CompactFlash card that came with the unit would only hold one (1) uncompressed, high-resolution picture - I needed more. I started looking and found this; the SanDisk 128 MB CompactFlash. I read on the Nikon technical support web page that SanDisk is the OEM for Nikon's CompactFlash cards, so I felt pretty safe selecting this card. The only question I had was "would my Coolpix 950 work with a card this large?" The answer is a resounding YES! (according to friends, it will work in the new Coolpix 990 also)

The card formatted in the camera perfectly and has simply worked for the past nine months. I shoot all pictures in high resolution with a moderate compression level, allowing me to store more than 110 - 2.1 MegaPixel pictures in the camera - plenty for me. Recently, we took a five-day trip to Disney World - this card captured ALL of our pictures perfectly. If you get this, check out one of the USB card readers as well - the serial connection is just way too slow for transferring this much data.

Executive Summary: Buy it now.

One of the "must-haves" for digital cameras is the ability to store a significant number of pictures. The SanDisk 128Mb card provided the ability to store over 700, which was adequate for our upcoming two-week vacation.

Why the SanDisk? I checked out compatibility (actually, the Kodak DX3600 required an upgrade to provide support for this product), and reviewed the ... organization's site ... . The dollars/megabyte, from one of the bigger manufacturers, was right. A five-year warranty closed the deal for me. Finally, it's proven itself reliable for the past few months. NO problems whatsoever.

I bought this about 10 hours before leaving for Disney World. I use it in a Nikon Coolpix 700 (2.1 mp) set at the basic mode (1600 x 1200, apx 240k per pic with full compression). I took 471 pictures and had room for over 100 more. Download of 108 meg with a USB card reader took about 5 minutes. A side effect I had not counted on was that write times increased as the card got full. With a 16MB card I never noticed this but toward the end of 128MB the delay was very noticeable. "Boot time" (pause after turning on the camera) was increased too. Again, something that was never an issue with a smaller card. A good reason to hang on to your older, smaller ram cards for things like sporting events frames per second are important. If picture quality is essential to your work, the size fo the card makes full TIFF images (8 meg per) a viable option. Memory may not be cheaper for a long time. I paid the same for this card that I paid for a 16MB card 2 years ago. Highly recomended.

I have been very happy with this CompactFlash card. It is used on my Kodak digital camera, and is very fast at saving the pictures. On this one flash card I can hold 307 highest quality pictures (8x10) before I have to change over to the original flash card that came with my camera. I highly recommend spending the extra money to get a 128 MB flash card if you are into digital photography.

If you think all CompactFlash cards are created alike, think again!! The SanDisk card is perfectly functional, but read/write times are very slow compared to other similarly-priced cards that are on the market. Check out products by Ridata and Transcend. These cards go for about the same price (or less) than the SanDisk products but are much faster. The only problem is that they are somewhat hard to find.

I have been researching and researching to determine if the SanDisk, Lexar, and Viking cards all had the same quality standards, read and write speeds, compatibility, etc.

I could not understand why the Viking cards tended to be less expensive (sometimes by quite a large delta), so assumed that there had to be some difference in quality.

SanDisk answered my question yesterday when they filed a lawsuit against Viking Components for purchasing the Lexar internal components for their CompactFlash cards (SanDisk had earlier sued Lexar, too) stating that they are infringing upon SanDisk's patents on the components.

Other than a lot of legal jargon, this tells me that the three cards: SanDisk, Lexar, and Viking are so similar in design, quality, speed, compatibility, etc. that they are able to get into lawsuits about it.

It also tells me one more thing--Lexar and Viking must be SanDisk's biggest competitors because they are the companies they are attacking first.

Kudos to Viking for building a product so similar in design, quality, performance, compatibility, etc. to their competitors but still willing to sell the product at a lower price to the consumer.

P.S. Viking is a very reputable company, I am sure that this matter doesn't deal with them directly. I would assume that it will go back to a battle between SanDisk and Lexar, after all the only thing Viking did was purchase a quality component from Lexar in order to build their flash cards to the highest quality standard.

I got this card because my Canon Powershot A20 was having some corruption problems with my Viking 128MB CF and Canon support said that they tested with Sandisk, not Viking, at that compacity. Anyways, the Sandisk 128MB CF works but it is at least half as slow as my old Viking, maybe slower. Wait time between shots is now almost unbearable. I suggest that you spend a little more to buy the Sandisk Ultra version (faster) or Lexar/Viking/Kingston brands. Heck, even SimpleTech is much faster.

I was on a trip to Europe this summer. Although I already had two 64 MB SanDisk CompactFlash cards, I bought the 128 MB when I upgraded to the Canon G1. In a minimally compressed mode the Canon can store 72 images on the SanDisk 128 MB card. I actually filled all my cards with vacation photos! Glad I made the purchase. This card has worked flawlessly for me and the price is very reasonable.

I used this 128MB Sandisk CF card with my Nikon 885 digital camera on a recent trip to Vietnam. While it does store plenty of high quality images, the issue I have with this card is the read/write rate. As the card fills up with pictures it becomes slow to store the picture you just took. I estimate that this took up to 15 seconds, an eternity while waiting to take another picture. Even more painful is reviewing and deleting pictures. Going through thumbnails of about 100 pictures took 5-10 minutes as the camera struggled to read from the memory card. I also took along a Lexar 16MB 8X card that displayed my pictures almost instantaneously. This is a lower capacity card but it gave me a comparison. Sandisk doesn't do a very good job of stating its read/write speeds. These speeds(along with # of MBs) is what distinguishes mainstream from professional quality cards. Professional photographers don't have time to wait to take another picture or review their older pictures. I am buying a large capacity Lexar 12X card to be my primary high storage card and the Sandisk card will be my backup for overflow situations.

I popped the 128 MB card into my Nikon Coolpix 880, formatted it, and started taking pictures. It works, it's fast.