what's faster- xD or CF?

ajmall · May 28, 2005

looking at buying a bundle deal Fuji S3 with a new 1 Gig xD card. if compact flash is faster then i'd rather by the body only and get the CF separately...

usayit · May 28, 2005

Pretty much an open ended question...

Guess its going to depend on the which xD card is included and which CF card you are comparing too. There are CF cards that have transfer rates up to 20mb/sec... but you are going to pay for it. Not to mention the transfer rates of the camera itself.

ajmall · May 29, 2005

ah ok, i'm not too clued up on cards as i haven't shot much digital. what's the fastest 1 GB CF or xD card on the market at the moment? bearing in mind if i get the S3 it produces 25MB RAW images!

darin3200 · May 29, 2005

The fastest card on the market would probably be something like the Lexar 80x CF card which writes at 12 megabytes per second. However, acorrding to this review the S3 can only write 2.1 mbps, so you would be wasting money buy at really fast card. So you could buy a 1 gig XD card which can be found on froogle for about $100 (54£) which have transfer rates 3mbps writing or a 1gig Ultra II CompactFlash Card from SanDisk which do about 9mbs writing for just under the price of an XD card.
What camera package you should buy really depends on how much the XD card costs when added to the S3

ajmall · May 31, 2005

ow. that's a bit of a bummer. well after speaking to a photographer and spending HOURS reading reviews on the internet i'm thinking either a D70s seeing as i have nikon lenses or a 20D. i have a £1000 roughly to play with.

it's so frustrating that nikon don't have direct competition for the 20D around the £1000 mark and they've just produced 2 new "pro"sumer cameras (D50 and D70s) one of which is pretty much exactly the same as the previous! ggrrr

thanks for your help though.