Customer Reviews

SanDisk SDCFX3-016G-A31 16 GB Extreme III CompactFlash Card (Retail Package)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

SanDisk has pulled a fast one on us who are accustomed to the Extreme III & IV series. They've updated the Extreme III series with a new "2008" spec model. Yeah, so what... Well, the 2008 spec Extreme III 16GB CF card is almost twice as fast as the original "20x" Extreme III 16GB CF card in my Nikon D3. In fact, the 2008 16GB model is just marginally slower than my Extreme IV 8GB card in my D3. This speed increase makes a big difference for me when shooting motorsports in RAW mode and hyperactive children. Even crazier still, as of this review, Amazon is selling the 2008 spec Extreme III 16GB card for ~$15 less than this much slower model.

Do yourself a favor before buying one of these cards and see how it will perform in your camera first... google for "Rob Galbraith CF performance database" and look up your camera. Buy intelligently!

I just purchased the Nikon D300, and found that my "old" 4 GB SanDisk Ultra III CF card wasn't gonna cut it in this beast. Low and behold - the 16 GB is now shipping. The price was great, it arrived a day early, and I couldn't be happier. The Nikon formatted it without any issues at all. Here are the number of images the D300 (12.3 MP) can write to this card:

RAW - 606
TIFF - 423
Fine (JPG) - 1400
Normal (JPG) - 2900
Basic (JPG) - 5800

RAW + Fine - 430
RAW + Normal - 503
RAW + Basic - 549

Read/Write performance is excellent, and I look forward to not swapping cards out anymore. The two were made for each other.

You can't format the card in the camera. The camera in theory only supports 8gb cards, but it will recognize the 16gb card. HOWEVER, it will format the 16gb card as 8gb.

If you use a card reader attached to a computer to format the card, it will remain at 16gb and the camera will continue to see it as 16gb.

Word of caution... for most situations, multiple smaller cards are better. It's great you can get 1000s of images on a single card, but what happens if the card fails? Even high quality cards fail. 16gb cards are great for high-end uses, but for normal shooting (particularly if it's over several days) you really should use smaller cards.

I do time lapse photography, so I shoot several thousand frames over a few hours. The card works great for this. Would I use this to shoot a weeks worth of vacation photos? No way. Use smaller cards for that and offload them to the computer frequently.

I own several pro DSLR Nikon and Canon cameras. This card works great with all of them and has a relatively fast write capability, although it is not the fastest card that I own. I can save about 4000 high quality JPEG or about 1200 RAW images on this card. This is very handy if you shoot a lot of photos such as in car racing, sport events, air shows etc, as I do. You never have to worry if you have enough room therefore I highly recommend this CF card. The only thing I do not like about the card that sometimes I find it just not fast enough, my camera's buffer fills up quite quickly and wish it would be as fast as the Extreme IV series.

I bought this memory card for my new Canon 40D and it's just amazing. I'll never again have to worry about memory space. I recon I can take up to 3500 hi-res pics (without RAW) on this card. I keep on clicking and clicking and the indicator on my camera keeps showing 999 pictures available (which is the maximum the camera can show). It's about time Canon updated their cameras to reflect the true number of pictures that can be taken, especially that memory card capacity is always on the rise.
If you're as impatient as I am to download your photos and view them on a proper screen, you will notice that trasfering photos out of this card is quite slow, especially if you've filled your card with hundreds of photos.
Nevertheless, I had no hesitations and have no regrets.

I purchased this memory card, not for a camera, but for a pocket pc, specifically a Dell Axim x51v. I must say that this high capacity card is truly amazing. Both my computer and my Axim recognized the full 15.26 GB of space and when copying 12 GB of music to the card, it took less than an hour. It is beastly fast, immensely large, and for the price, it was well worth it.

Just for camera enthusiasts. Beware of buying too much memory because I believe most cameras, like my Rebel XT max out at 999 available shots.

Speedy with my Nikon d300 and nothing holds more. worth every penny especially when shooting at the highest res. no lag time whatsoever although that does depend on your camera.

I was concerned about my new 12mp Nikon D700 because of my experience with the D100. Back then the biggest card you could get for a reasonable price was a 1gig microdrive. When I saw this card, I debated between getting it or 2 8gig ones, but it turns out that the 16Gig one is cheaper.

As for performance, I have been very very pleased. The write-time is excellent for the RAW (NEF)files as well as TIFFs, as for how long, all I can say is that by the time I take the camera away from my face to see if the card-access light is off, it usually is, so it is probably measured in seconds if not fractions of a second.

I also experimented with having the camera take Raw pictures with jpg backups at the same time (a very cool feature on the D700) and again found the write-speed to be excellent.

As for the capacity on the card, at RAW setting, I get just above 800 shots for the card! In Tiff settings this bumps down to 500 or so (about the same as the RAW + Jpg dual setting). If you just take the large quality Jpgs, the number of shots jumps to 2.2k... kinda of overkill, but really when you think of going out on a vacation and trying to travel light, this pretty much guarantees that you won't have to worry about downloading the pictures until you get home.

All in all, it is an excellent product. I would recommend this over other brands as my experience with Sandisk has been excellent over the years and have never had any sort of memory loss.

This is a compact flash the can handle everything you throw at it. I use it in a Cannon EOS MarkII DS1 that is a full frame 16.1 mega pixel that shoots very fast. This card was a great investment it has no problem handling the speed. If you need a compact flash with some very serious space...you have found it.

I have been using this card for over a month now it worked flawlessly. I recommend Sandisk because I have been using my Sandisk CF 2GB since Jan. 2005 I used it in my Minolta 7D and then in my Canon 400D and now in my Fostex FR-2LE Digital Sound Recorder it has been working fine ever since I used it without any data loss or malfunction.