Customer Reviews

SanDisk Extreme III 4 GB CompactFlash Memory Card SDCFX3-004G-A31

5 star:		(151)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Contrary to the rating given by the previous reviewer, having a camera that is incapable of keeping up with the speed of the card is not a basis for a mediocre rating on the card itself. I've got an EOS 20D and I find this card much faster than my 512 Mb Sandisk Ultra II card. I highly recommend the card for those with cameras that have a high speed buffer. It allows many more pictures in a burst than the manufacturers claim because they base their estimates on slower cards. This card is well worth the money if you shoot a lot of high speed activities like sports, racing, airshows, fast moving animals, etc.

I thought I was dreaming a nightmare when I read a review that gave 3 stars to this product because of a limitaton in the product it was used in. I have several SanDisk Extreme III CF and SD (1 gig SD) cards, and they are nothing less than rock solid awesome. I use the SD cards in a Canon S2 IS, and a 1D Mk II N. The CF cards live in the 1D pretty much all of the time.

Other companies make pretty fast and durable flash cards, but SanDisk Extreme III cards are the fastest, and damn near bullet proof to boot. In my humble opinion, they are the best you can buy at the present time. If I happened to have an older camera that is limited in it's data transfer speed by virtue of it's vintage, I would still buy the most reliable, and fastest flash media available for it.

The day will come when a new camera tickles your fancy, and it would be a shame to have to discard your current collection of flash cards just because they are too slow to work with your new camera. CF and SD flash cards are here to stay for awhile. They have a lifetime of very active use rated at better than ten years. I can only speak for myself, but in a ten year period, I might buy several cameras.

Go for the best price, but go for the best product too. The SanDisk Extreme III cards cost as little as fifty Dollars per gig, and leave plenty of room for future camera updates.

This is the fastest card yet as of March 28, 2005. Using the data collected at: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp in the CF Database. I was able to make a more informed decision. I had my heart set on the Hitachi Microdrive 3GB when initially purchasing my Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT 350D. However, after reviewing the results of the write speed tests, I immediately switched to the San Disc Extreme III. For my camera write speed using this CF is 4.888MB/sec JPEG and 6.263MB/sec RAW compared to the Hitachi Microdrive 6GB 3.466MB/sec JPEG and 4.584MB/sec RAW. Check out Rob Galbraith site to help sift through the confusion of which CF Card to purchase for your camera.

This card has the best rated speed for the Olympus E500, and the performance was great for about 5 months. In that last couple weeks, however, it has failed twice. The first time was when trying to transfer photos to the computer, and the computer could not recognize the card. After my husband reformatted it (and losing pictures in the process), it was working fine. The second time was fortunately while practicing with a new filter. It gave a "card error" message. At this point, I'll contact SanDisk. I will update here with the results.

Customer service update:
SanDisk was good about replacing this. They were a little resistant initially and required I perform some tests to prove to them that it was failing, but after I jumped through their hoops, they provided me with a UPS number, I took it into UPS for shipping to their technicians, who promptly had me sent a new one.

Update Sept 2007:
If possible, I would now upgrade my rating from 3 to 4 stars. The new card has been in use for 9 months with no problems. So, I would purchase this again, especially for an Olympus Evolt. I would just take lots of practice pictures with the card before relying on it for anything important.

Update Nov 2008:
The replacement card has worked without fail.

SanDisk is known as a reliable name in flash memory cards. I have purchased SanDisk memory cards for years and have never had any of them fail on me. So when I recently purchased a new Canon EOS 40D digital SLR camera, I knew that I wanted a SanDisk CompactFlash card, to record all of my precious photos. I looked up the specs of the many choices that SanDisk offers. I also read many reviews, right here on Amazon, and decided that the Extreme III series CompactFlash was what I needed.

Wanting the ability to store several hundred photos on a single card, I chose the 4GB Extreme III CompactFlash card. I inserted the 4GB Extreme III into my new digital SLR camera and formatted it. At 10.1 megapixels, and at the largest JPG setting, my camera shows that the card will hold roughly 900 pictures. I began snapping pictures and was instantly amazed at how quickly the data saved to the card. After I had about 50 pictures on the card, I removed it from the camera and inserted it into the card reader attached to my PC. I copied all of the photos from the card onto my PC hard drive. Again I am amazed at how quickly this memory card can move data. This card is awesome! I have always thought that the many claims of faster speed in memory cards was purely hype, to get consumers to plunk down extra cash. Well I can honestly tell you that there IS a difference. Compaired to an older 512 MB CompactFlash card that I use in a different camera, this Extreme III series card is at least 2 to 3 times faster in transferring digital photos.

I have noticed a few low scoring reviews, here on Amazon, from people that have had their SanDisk memory cards fail. I am sorry to hear that others have not had as much luck with their SanDisk cards as I have. I suppose there is always going to be a certain amount of failure with any electronic device on the market. All I can say is that I have been using SanDisk flash memory devices for years, including SD, Memory Stick Pro, MicroSD (transflash), CompactFlash, and even several different Cruzer USB flash drives, and have never had one case of failure. I have worked in the I.T. field for over 20 years and I can asure you that I am not a light user by any means. Any data storage media I own is used frequenty and intensly. In my book there is no better manuafacturer of portable memory media than SanDisk, and I will remain a loyal user until they decide to cut back on quality and I start to experience failures and lost data.

I highly recommend this Extreme III series CompactFlash card by SanDisk. I also recommend that you purchase it from Amazon. I made the mistake of buying mine from a local electronics store, which charged me nearly twice the price of what Amazon is selling it for. I was in a hurry and needed it right away, and boy did I pay a premium! Amazon has a great price on this excellent memroy card, and their return policy and customer service are top notch.

I bought this memory card to use with my Canon Rebel XT digital camera for my vacations. It responds very fast and it bears over 1000 photos of 5Megapixels, so there's no need to carry more than one memory with you. The only downside to it is the time it takes to upload all images to the computer while using the USB 2.0 port... :(

Think about it. After spending $15,000 for a trip would you take your rolls of 35mm or APS film to the nearest corner drug store for 15 minute developing? Of course not. You would seek out the best lab in your area and explain which rolls need push processing because the flash couldn't light up enough and you'd talk to a lab chemist who would develop your photos for you. You might have a CD/DVD burned of the scans for the final touch at home, and it might cost $400 to get your film processed, but no scratches, and most importantly NO PROBLEMS.

The same holds true for large and fast memory cards. When you get to 4GB and up or 130x and up speeds, problems creep in. Will the 130x card have such a fast risetime at cold temperatures that you miss your photos on Mt. Everest? (CMOS speeds up at cold and has a ringing problem as a result). Do you have a $260,000 Thermotron environmental chamber to test your memory card at temperature and altitude before leaving on your trip? NO? Then just buy the best.

And this is the best. I had a 4GB transcend memory card. I thought I was set - I bought Amazon's Wolverine MP3/video/CF/SD reader with the 80GB user upgradable disk. All my SanDisk cards transferred flawlessly - but my "TRANSCEND" 4GB 130x card DID NOT - it locked up the Wolverine. It worked in the camera. It worked in my desktop replacement laptop (dell 1705) but it didn't work in my pocket mp3 player and card depository so I can keep on shooting without lugging the laptop with me.

This was a major issue - the wolverine was pricewise comparable with the ipod yet had SO many more features and a much larger LCD, not to mention the 2 card slots and muticard compatibility, long battery life, etc. Loosing the ability to dump the 4GB card to it was a major issue with a multimegapixel camera that can write the card so long as you hold the shutter down!

I switched and bought this card - the 4GB Extreme III which came with about $50 in software for recovery of lost data (believe me that is well worth it when you lost your Everest pictures and the camera can preview them on the card, but your pc can not transfer them at all!). The Wolverine yanks the photos out of the 4GB card like any other 1GB card and saves them to disk, even lets you preview the CF/SD cards before doing the disk transfer. And fast too.

Inside the camera (with the high speed card upgrade) write times are flawlessly fast - hold down the button in raw mode and the pictures just stream to the card. For reading, I must admit I did comprimise since I have 2 laptops - one with an integral 7 in 1 reader - this one (the dell 1705) doesn't have a CF or a PCMCIA so I got the USB $9.50 fry's special reader. It works fine - and equally fast to my laptop with the builtin (alienware).

This will be my PRIMARY CF card - I have a couple 1 GB cards for other camera backs, but the Extreme III is just so fast the camera flys. A note of caution - NONE of this is of value unless your CAMERA supports high speed writes (and preferably reads). High speed means different things to different people. We are talking about 20 MB/s (Yea - megaBYTES) or 133 x (133 X 150 Kbps). Without these write abilities in your camera, the card will work, but your money may be better spent unles an upgrade is in your future.

Enjoy digital. Be thankful searching for a lab to process those sealed rolls of film is gone now.

Sandisk Compact flash has performed very well for me for about 4 years. This model is great, especially at today's prices.

The Extreme III product is fast enough to take RAW+JpegFine images on my Nikon D200 up to about 12-18 images non-stop. At five frames per second, I never miss the action. My key objective is great photography, not videography. Some people may be conflicted between a CAMERA and CAMCORDER usage.

Speed can be more of an issue during uploading onto my computer, where USB 2.0 is good, but I don't expect hard drive speed from Compact Flash. I simply take a break while uploading the images.

This product will allow high speed photography on a Nikon D200. Some cameras models don't have enough in-camera memory BUFFER storage to capture a long burst of images. I wouldn't blame the Extreme III compact flash speed for this shortcomming, but recommend an upgraded camera body instead.

Of course, I don't want or need 50 frames of "motion picture" sequences, yet this is possible with small jpeg ONLY image sizes. A 10 megapixel RAW image requires lots of storage.

The Extreme III CF cards from Sandisk claim to be able to take on extreme temperature conditions, along with fast performance. These latest edition work as advertised. We have several 2GB versions (which are a little faster) which also have worked flawlessly for us. The cards are a little more expensive than other brands, but we think it's worth it for the performance and the little extras (like RescuePro data recovery software). We have to feel confident in the flash cards we use.

UPDATE: We've also used 8GB and 12GB versions of this card to date.

Besides being faster than a lot of other CompactFlash cards, this one also comes with a few exclusive perks. 1) Higher operating tolerances (temperature and shock) than pretty much any other card, 2) Recover software on a mini CD (you know for your other memory cards), 3) A little neoprene(like?) case that zips up two CF cards.

So even if you camera can't make use of the card's really high speeds, the extras may make the extra costs worth while.