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Kingston 2GB Elite Pro CompactFlash Card |
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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Saturday, 16 June 2007 |
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Page 1 of 2
Thanks to Kingston for the product sample.
When you hear Kingston, the first thing that comes to mind is their very successful HyperX memory line, but like most companies these days the only way to progress is to innovate and diversify. This is one reason why Kingston also manufactures a very competitive USB flash drive series (quite possibly the fastest currently on the market as per our review) as well as a huge line of ValueRAM and removable storage. Although many formats exist, CompactFlash seems to be taking the lead as the standard for digital cameras and other products. A little over a month ago Kingston launched their highest capacity CF cards to date, in 2GB and 4GB flavors.
Lo and behold, they were nice enough to send us a 2GB sample. The blister pack includes the card in a plastic cartridge and a foldout warranty/manual. Kingston makes two types of CompactFlash, the "normal" version and this Elite Pro. Regular CF cards are available in 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB sizes. Elite Pro cards can be found in the big & tall aisle: 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and a whopping 4GB! That's enough to store hundreds of RAW uncompressed images and a whole lot of MP3s. High capacity CF cards are also ideal for personal backups (favorites, important files, etc) since they're treated as removable drives and you can create your own folder structure as well as synchronize backups.
The plastic container is good for transportation and folds open after you release the latch on the end. The main difference between Kingston's regular CF cards and their Elite Pro line is the type of NAND flash chip. The standard CF cards use Multi-Level Cells (MLC) which translates into two data values per cell. The Elite Pro uses Single-Level Cells (SLC) which translates to one data value per cell. This allows for higher capacities and higher speeds, both of which are crucial when dealing with high resolution images and any other large files.
The front side of the label depicts the capacity and name of the model. The back sticker has a few lines so you can label the card accordingly. Physically it measures 1.43" x 1.68" x 0.13" (36.4mm x 42.8mm x 3.3mm), the typical CompactFlash size. Kingston claims some very high transfer rates with these: up to 10MB/s read and 8MB/s write. We'll see how this claim holds up, but after using it in my camera and transferring files through my card reader, it was noticeably faster than my current card. A lot faster, I dare say.
I use a (now discontinued) Canon PowerShot G3 4MP camera. It came with a 32MB CF card, which I'll be using for comparison. As a testament to the sheer capacity of the 2GB card, after a format (which took under 5 seconds) I could store 537 RAW (uncompressed) images, 1818 large images (2272x1704 resolution), 3598 medium images (1600x1200 resolution), 6231 medium-small images (1024x768 resolution), and 9999 small images (640x480 resolution). But it gets better; as with many Kingston products (including this one) you get a lifetime warranty and free technical support.
For testing the cards objectively I used a previously reviewed PPA 9-in-1 USB2.0 card reader. On the software side of things, I used SiSoft's Sandra 2004 removable storage/flash and file system benchmarks as well as Simpli Software's HD Tach RW 3.0.1 8mb zones quick test. Here are the results:
First is Sandra's removable storage/flash benchmark. My 32MB Canon CompactFlash ended up at the bottom of the pile. 256KB read performance was 1.9MB/s and 580KB/s write. More important is the 2MB file test, since a lot of the higher resolution images fall into this range. Here the Canon CF card again scored 1.9MB/s read and 785KB/s write. Not terribly impressive.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 16 June 2007 )
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