[Ric Easton]

This week CompUSA has PNY 2 gig Compact Flash cards for 69.99 (after rebates off of their 99.99 price)

Is PNY any good? I know the San Disk Ultra and Extreme cards are quite good... are the PNY's a major step down? I have a Canon Digital Rebel XT.

[Man-Fai Wong]

I hadn't heard anything bad about PNY in terms of reliability, but it sounds like a slow-ish card. Does PNY make any fast cards at all? Not sure if that matters to you, but it would probably matter to me if I had a D-Rebel XT. I forget what's the RAW buffer like on the XT, but it's probably rather small, and a slow card shooting 8MP RAW files w/ a small buffer could be a pain. Also, offloading lots of 8MP RAW files to computer would be a pain too w/ a slow card.

FYI, here's Rob Galbraith's page for CF card performances w/ the XT:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...?cid=6007-7699

They only list a generic PNY 512MB card, and it's way down near the bottom for read/write performance. Unless the card you're looking at has some special high speed branding or such, it'll probably perform about the same as that 512MB card.

You're probably better off going w/ a Sandisk Ultra II 2GB instead since prices have been falling -- someone recently posted that they're down to ~$80-90 now.

_Man_

[Ric Easton]

Thanks, Man-Fai!

I think I'll stick with Sandisk!

[AjayM]

I have a 20D and the RAW buffer is a whole 7 images, and it's always 7 images regardless if I'm using an ultra-cheap ultra-slow CF card or a ultra-fast card. If I'm shooting large JPG there may be a difference, but I can still do a string of 20+ shots with the ultra-slow cards when I tested it. But out of all the shots I've taken with the 20D the only time I've shot the buffer full was testing it out, the longest string I've ever done of "real" photo's was about 10. Write to disk would improve, but moving 1GB of data across USB2 even with a slow card only takes a few minutes.

I basically buy whatever I can find that is a good value/cheap and don't worry much about speed. YMMV though, if you shoot a lot of action/sports/etc I wouldn't skimp on card speed and I'd go for the fastest I could find.