Compact Flash drives have become a bit old nowadays. Smaller SD, MMC and other flash cards are used more in gadgets. The reason is that Compact Flash cards need to have 50 pins and other smaller cards need from 4 to 8 pins. So there is the advantage there; you can make a smaller gadget and place a smaller card in it. However, devices like digital cameras are still pretty good size now and they usually use CF (Compact Flash) cards. CF cards are not only bigger they also use more energy as opposed to SD cards. However, you shouldn’t worry about that if you have a big and powerful camera.
There are some advantages too: for example it is easier to make flash cards that would have bigger volumes. It is pretty easy to make 16 GB CF card and even more. Simply buy adding microchips into its body.
The other advantage is that read/write speed when you use CF cards is higher as opposed to using SD flash cards. The difference is really big and we must admit that writing speed is crucial sometimes when you use cameras. It does matter when you want your camera to make one picture after another pretty fast.
Apacer Photo Steno Pro III
This is one of the best Apacer flash cards at the moment and has one of the fastest writing speeds. This series has started from the previous models like Pro III 88 x which are slower. Apacer Pro III 150x has a very cool speed of writing and it is written that it can do up to 21 MB/sec and 24 MB/sec reading speed. It is called 150x by the medium speed which is: (24+21)/2*1000/150=150x.
There are different capacity variations of the cards of this type. You can get a 1, 2, 4, 8 GB variations, so there ire some models to choose from.
Kingston Elite Pro
This is a whole series of several models that we can divide to smaller and higher level cards. The 512 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB cards are marked as 50x which is pretty low. It is something like 10 MB/sec reading speed and 8 MB/sec writing speed. However, the higher level ones are marked as 45x and their writing/reading speeds are even less. However, the older modifications of flash cards like this one having the capacity of 8 GB are cheaper. Besides, they where always making them better and better.
Kingston Ultimate
The whole line consists of 1, 2, 4, 8 GB models. 1 GB card is different from the others and has a speed of only 100x. However, other cards are marked as 133x which allows us to read with the speed of 23 MB/sec and write with the speed of 20 MB/sec. Besides, buying Kingston you will also get special software. On Track Easy Recovery Professional 6.1 program will allow you to recover data from your flash card if you lost it somehow.
Comparison
Capacity
Very often the cards do not have the whole capacity that is written on the cover. Let us see how much space we loose because of that.
| Apacer Photo Steno Pro III | Kingston Elite Pro | Kingston Ultimate | |
| Written Capacity | 2 GB | 8 GB | 8 GB |
| Real Capacity | 1977 MB | 7868 MB | 7930 MB |
So you loose less using Kingston CF cards. If you really need every MB that you can get you would want to buy Kingston CF card.
Reading Speed
Reading speed is an important characteristic that a CF card has. The cards have shown pretty good work and there are some moments we want to tell you about. Apacer Pro III turned out to be the fastest card here with the reading speed 18.7 MB/sec, however, right behind it comes Kingston Ultimate 8GB flash card with reading speed of 18.5 MB/sec. Kingston Elite was pretty good and it had the speed of 12.1 MB/sec.
There is a thought that it is not about the cards anymore, it is about the speed of the flash card drive's controller. So it is not the cards that work slow anymore.
Access time when reading
Before reading any data you need to access it on the card. The access time on reading is not that crucial and it is not big. The higher class models like Apacer have shown the speeds of about 0.9 ms and the Kingston Ultimate has shown 1 ms. Kingston Elite Pro has showed the time of 1.3 ms.
Writing speed
One of the most important if not the most important characteristic for a flash card nowadays is writing speed. When you take pictures on your camera it needs to save the picture onto the card and it takes time that you don't really want to wait. That is why it is so crucial to have high writing speed.
Apacer has become slower and had the speed of 17.3 MB/sec when writing data on it. The Kingston Ultimate had a speed of 18.1 MB/sec and I would say that it was pretty even.
Kingston Elite Pro has shown a modest speed of 8.4 MB/sec. Telling you honestly, we do not think that there is a camera that can write data faster, so I think that even Kingston Ultimate Pro 45x 8 GB will be enough for you.
Access time when writing
Here is where we had the biggest surprises; both Apacer Photo Steno Pro III x 150 and Kingston Ultimate 133x have shown very high time. It is 130.6 ms for Kingston Ultimate and 145.7 ms for Apacer Pro III. Kingston Elite has surprised us here and writing access time is 33.2 ms.
However, it is not that important nowadays. New digital cameras know how to avoid problems like this one on one hand. Besides, when you are buying a large capacity flashcard you will not be writing small (200-500 KB) files on it. So it is not that important.
If you are a usual user you will not really see the difference between all those flash cards. Apacer reads data faster but writes it slower. However, we think that it is just the controller of the flash card drive. Kingston has a better access time. I would really choose Kingston Pro if I had not much money. However, if you want to buy a flash card for long and for good you need to buy Apacer Photo Sten Pro III 150x or Kingston Ultimate.
