Even though the vast majority of consumer cameras and camcorders are using the SD card format these days, there are still a number of professional cameras that use the larger but faster CF format. If you’re looking to score a deal on some super-fast CompactFlash, the range of Lexar Professional 1000x UDMA7 CFcards are now on sale for up to 62% off.

The Lexar Professional 1000x CF cards uses something called UDMA 7 technology. This allows the memory cards to get industry leading 1000x minimum guaranteed read transfer speeds. That works out to 150MB/s. These cards are well-suited for DSLRs that utilize high burst rates, for example, or higher end camcorders that want to capture 1080p full HD, especially 3D video. Speaking of video, these Lexar CF cards support the Video Performance Guarantee VPG-20 specification for professional-quality video.

Of course, to take advantage of those super fast UDMA 7 speeds, you’ll need to have a UDMA 7 enabled card reader. With that combination, you’ll vastly improve your workflow, getting the pictures and videos from your camera to your computer in a much faster or more efficient manner. And since it’s coming from a well-known and respected brand like Lexar, you can be sure you’re getting reliability and quality too.

The 16GB card is on sale for $69.66 on Amazon, down from the list price of $185.40. The rest of the capacities are also on sale. You can pick up the 32GB for $128.79 (save 62%), the 64GB for $349 (save 40%), or the behemoth 128GB card for $524.50 (save 47%). And yes, you get free shipping too.

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Possibly motivated by constant complaints about the high price of seemingly cheap memory products, Lexar’s factory tour video, released on YouTube last week, details the long, grueling process involved in the manufacturing process of memory chips.

Don’t worry too much about audio when you watch it. As a matter of fact, we recommend you play your own music. The information is all given in a strip of text at the bottom of the screen, one pearl of wisdom at a time, while 6.5 minutes of cheesy 80s-style techno-pop tracks play in the background.

The video, as does the life of a Lexar chip, starts in Lehi, Utah. The Micron Technology factory, which the video states is 100 times cleaner than a hospital operating room and the only one of its kind in America. Thousands of workers take the chips through more than 800 processes over the course of a month – a task that never ceases, but continues 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. 366 on leap years.

In the US the wafers holding memory-chips-to-be are handled by robotic arms, carried around by futuristic little boxes on overhead tracks, shoved into and pulled out of supercomputer-toaster hybrid machines. It seems humans are only involved to supervise the machines, maybe provide a bit of quality control.

But after a month, the wafers hit puberty and are sent off to Asia for assembly. At the plant in Asia, you may notice the people are actually doing things rather than standing around, staring at computer screens while robots zip around oblivious to their existence.

It’s all brought to a close with a few not-Hollywood-quality sequence shots of a lady loading a Lexar chip into her camera, taking a picture with a silly grin on her face.

It’s doubtful the video will be getting any thumbs from Siskel and Ebert, but it does definitely give a new appreciation for what many people view as a throw-away technology.

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Lexar 32GB 600X Compact Flash UDMA Card Photo: Lee Thomas

32 gigabytes for the average Joe is a ton of storage; it works out to roughly 1700 raw images with a 12 megapixel camera. The days of digital have brought on the need for massive amounts of storage to keep with increasing megapixels and backing up your digital files. With that said, you as a consumer put plenty of trust in the companies that provide the storage media. While quality varies even from the most commonly known manufacturers, I still buy digital media from trusted and proven companies to reduce the risk; 32GB is a lot to lose if a card was to fault.

The Lexar Professional 600x Series compact flash card is aimed at pros that need the fastest CF they can get their hands on. The ever increasing size and speed of built in camera buffers and FPS demands a reliable, fast solution; the 600x series from Lexar is just that. Boasting a minimum sustained write speed of 90 MB/second, you will find it fast enough to keep up with the fastest DSLR’s on the market today; such as the Nikon D3X, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III or any UDMA supported camera for that matter.

Lexar priced the 600x 32GB at $499.99. Quite a heftytag for a digital media card, considering the 300x 32GB version goes for half that at $249.99. Half the price, same amount of storage, and double the speed; or is it?

Thrown in to sweeten the deal is some software. Lexar Image Rescue, for recovering files, even if they have been erased or the card corrupted. Now, this isn’t a 100% fool-proof solution, but hey, if it works, you just saved your ass for nothing. You get a 30 day trial of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (my personal favorite) and a $100 off if you dive in to buy the full version.

If you’re not a professional photographer, will you notice the benefits this card has to offer? In short, no. Unless you are shooting high FPS for extensive bursts you won’t likely notice a difference. To test this card for the average Joe photographer, like myself, I compared it against an 8GB 300x card to see if I could notice any difference. The test bed camera was a D300 and backed up on a Macbook Pro. I didn’t notice any significant difference in speed on my workflow.

For the pros, its a no-brainer. Shooting sports with a heavy finger on the shutter you’d easily notice the cards speed. If you want to see how Lexar’s new card fare’s against your old card, I’d recommend checking out Rob Galbraith’s performance database.

I don’t have extremely high rated camera gear, but this review isn’t for the gear junkie pros, its for the average photographer who wants to get the most out of their photography experience. If you want to get down to the nitty gritty you can consult the XBench results below.

Read and write performance from and to the computer through the Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader were pretty average, I expected a lot more than it achieved; 2GB of data was pulled off the 600x at 1:46 minutes, only slightly faster than the 300x at 1:51 minutes. I suspect it is hampered by my laptop, and not the card itself. Who knows if faster setups will be able to obtain better results, but most mobile professional photographers use MacBook’s, so this is pretty close to what should expect.

Real World Test (geek stuff):
Equipment used for testing:
Late 2008 MacBook Pro 2.6ghz
OSX 10.6.3
4GB RAM
200GB 7200RPM Harddrive
Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader

Read/Write time to copy files to card:
DATA: 1.93 GB on disk (1,925,803,995 bytes) in NEF raw file format
Lexar Professional 300x 4GB
Write 300x 4GB – 1:48
Read 300x 4GB – 1:51
Lexar Professional 600x 32GB
Write 600x 32GB – 1:44
Read 600x 32GB – 1:46
Write to Buffer:
The timing started when the data activity light on the D300 came on, to when it shut off, after a burst of 17* RAW shots.

17 Shots RAW (10.2mb per file)
*NOTE: The 600x card allowed for a burst of 18 shots instead or 17. That’s 1 more file per burst than the slower 300x card. Pretty nifty!
Lexar 32GB 600x: 15 sec
Lexar 4GB 300x: 18 sec

XBench Results (Raw data tests)

Lexar 600x 32GB:

Disk Test 12.15
Sequential 84.61
Uncached Write 89.00 54.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 105.98 59.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 49.44 14.47 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 156.74 78.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 6.54
Uncached Write 1.75 0.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 26.74 8.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1359.43 9.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 464.37 86.17 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Lexar 300x 4GB:

Disk Test 8.38
Sequential 55.25
Uncached Write 61.17 37.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 66.31 37.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 35.29 10.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 79.16 39.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 4.53
Uncached Write 1.20 0.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 23.98 7.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1397.42 9.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 208.33 38.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader Photo: Lee Thomas

Bottom Line

A great buy for professionals who need high capacity and high sustained write speeds. If you shoot JPEG it would be extremely hard to get to a point where the card can’t handle the amount of data coming through the buffer. RAW is a different story, but it would be a long time before you could max out the speed.
For the amateur I’d recommend the less pricey 300x version of the card. Unless you’ve shelled out $5,000+ on a camera you won’t notice the difference. At half the price you still get 32GB of storage, this will allow you to keep shooting for days without having to dump your card. With my D300 I never feel hampered by the speed of compact flash cards these days. If you are looking to upgrade to a faster card, unless you have an old slower card, or a micro-drive, you won’t notice the speed, only the capacity. The Lexar brand is also extremely well revered in the professional community due to its reliability.

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Lexar 32GB 600x Compact Flash Card

Maybe it’s because I’m not really in the digital SLR market, but I find that even SLRs are moving toward using the SD family of memory cards for most of their storage needs. It’s not quite as dated as the floppy disk, but I don’t see too many Compact Flash products kicking around these days.

But they’re still around and their owners still need to buy more memory. Lexar has announced that it has a couple of new memory cards for precisely this market and they are among the biggest and fastest to date. The pair of 32GB Professional Compact Flash cards are boasting 600x and 300x speed ratings. That’s pretty peppy.

Working alongside Lexar’s Professional ExpressCard CF Reader, the cards offer increased speed and performance over their predecessors. The 600x card can move those photos around at a guaranteed minimum sustained write speed of 90MB/sec, whereas the 300x card does it at 45MB/sec. You’ll need an UDMA 6-enabled device to do that.

Professional photographers, especially those who use rapid shots for sports photography, will appreciate the increased speed and performance. They’ll need to pay for it, though. The 300x 32GB card is $250 and the 600x card is twice that at $500. Ouch.

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