Customer Reviews

Toshiba SD-M1283B3 128MB SD Card for e300,400,700 and 800 series

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I bought a digital camera (Kodak C330) and a Toshiba SD card 256MB for it. I also laid my hands on SD cards from other manufacturers. This card had a excellent neat appearance as you would expect from a product made in Japan. It was pleasant to hold it in hands, look at it, and use it. The label is printed on the plastic surface of the card (it is the only known to me card which has a label printed on body and not a paper sticker). The paper sticker labels on the other cards get easily scratched and quickly loose their appearance. I cannot complain about the transfer speed of this card, as my camera itself cannot write with a high speed. The speed of writing to this card was the same as the speed of writing to the camera's internal memory. I am quite happy here. The manufacturer says that this card has a read speed of 7 MB/s and a write speed of 2MB/s. I read somewhere the Toshiba designers increased the read speed significantly with decreasing the write speed as compared to an SD card of the same class from another manufacturer. For example, some reviewers claim that Sandisk SD cards have a read speed of 5 MB/s and a write speed of 3 MB/s, and some claim the speed is even slower, such as 2MB/s both ways. Either of the cards is fine for me as my camera writes and reads with a speed of less than 1 MB/s. Also, there is an issue of transfer of all of your pictures from the camera to your PC. You want to have the transfer as speedy as possible. In my case I found out that the inbuilt SD card reader in my notebook had a limit of writing/reading of 1.5 MB/s. Realistically this means that it takes several seconds to populate the thumbnails view in the Windows Explorer with the little images of pictures, and it takes about a second for any picture to be downloaded to PC when I click on thumbnail. But this is OK with me as I do not make many pictures. One can buy an external card reader which is connected to PC through USB1.1 or USB2 port which have a transfer speed of 12 MB/s or 48 MB/s correspondingly. For comparison, the premium-speed ("Ultra") cards on the market have both write and read speed of 10 MB/s. I was not able to measure the download (read) speed of the Toshiba SD card which I had on my hands due to my technical constraints, however it is worth to remember that when the manufacturers do not indicate the transfer speed on the card, then it may well be below the claimed maximum speed (i.e. 7 MB/s and 2 MB/s in the case of this card). The speed of card varies from batch to batch.

I played with a Toshiba SD card (256 MB) made in Taiwan. It had a paper sticker label and its mechanical finish was coarse (e.g. the metal contacts looked more roughly made and the plastic body seams had unpleasantly-looking swelling etc). In other words, I got a feeling of a well-made product when I held a Japan-made card in my hands (pictured above), while I did not have the same feeling with the Taiwan-made card, and, frankly, with the cards of other manufacturers made in Taiwan or China.

I also bought China-made Sandisk SD card. Its performance in my camera and in my PC was undistinguishable from the Toshiba SD card performance to my untrained eye. I did not get as much of satisfaction of holding a well-finished product in my hands as I got with the Japan-made Toshiba. The Sandisk card seemed to have some residual swelling of the seams which I did not notice in Japan-made Toshiba. The contacts were made by a different technology but looked neat unlike those of the Taiwan-made Toshiba. The plated Sandisk card contacts seemed to be wearing out quicker than the contacts of the Japan-made Toshiba, but perhaps it was an effect of wearing out the contact-protective layer from the Sandisk card.

I did not have a chance to test the card made by Panasonic (the third great manufacturer of the original SD alliance), but I heard the opinions that the Panasonic cards of the same class may have a less read speed than Toshiba, however Panasonic SD cards perform better when the information is accessed accidentally (not in a serial manner). This is alleged to be true especially when comparing Panasonic cards with Sandisk, the latter having a high absolute transfer speed but performing worse than Panasonic card in the real-life situations (with palm-PCs).