I recently replaced my motley collection of elderly flash cards.

After quite a few hours searching and reading up on the possibilities, I settled on B&H as the best vendor - cheaper than most, enormous range to choose from, and you can be confident of getting the genuine article, not some no-name cheapie remarked as a Sandisk Mega-Lightspeed-Wonder.

I ordered 2 x 128GB Lexar 1066x Compact Flash cards (for the 7D II and the 1D IV) at US$100 each, a 32GB Delkin SDHC for the 1D IV at US$27 (this is the largest SD card the ageing 1D IV can use), and a 64GB Sony SDXC for the 7D II at US$42.

All four are either the fastest available or near enough as makes no difference to it. They are all for use in my two birding cameras, where speed really does matter. (The cameras I use for landscapes and family happy snaps get the hand-me-downs because with single shots, card speed is irrelevant.) It is very important to look carefully at card speeds. Nearly all vendors quote read speed, which really doesn't matter a damn. Who cares if it takes 5 minutes 20 seconds to upload your pictures for the day instead of 4 minutes 52 seconds? The important speed is the write speed, because if you shoot bursts of action, buffer-full can be a bit of a disaster. When you press the shutter, you want to take the pictures, not wait around for the buffer to clear - you've probably spent an entire day getting into position for the shot and waiting for the bird / footballer / rally car to come along.

So if you are buying a flash card, look hard at write speed. You can pretty much ignore all the other specs except those that tell you if it is compatible with your camera. In general, the price difference between decently fast and very fast cards is quite small. (If you only take single shots, you can get good quality but very slow cards for next to nothing. You'd be mad to spend $US100 on a Lexar 1066x when you'd get exactly the same benefit from a $30 card from the same manufacturer or one of equal quality. Well, almost - your upload speed will be slower, but if you only take single shots you are not going to have all that many files to upload anyway.)

One more thing about cards before I get onto the reader: why have both SD and SF cards? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just get SD, and faster to just get CF? Yes, indeed, for most purposes. But with dual-slot cameras, if you shoot raw + JPG (as I always do) you can send the larger raw files to the CF (with is the faster one of the two) and the JPGs to the SD. This is faster than sending them all to a single card. Whether the benefit is significant, I can't say. It used to be on the 1D IV using my slow old cards (they were state-of-the-art wen I bought them, but that was a long time ago), however recent cards are so much faster that maybe it doesn't matter now.

On average, JPGs are a bit less than half the size of raws, so you want a CF card around twice the capacity of the SD. (In the case of the 1D IV, which is limited to 32GB SDHC, a 64GB CF would have been big enough: I only got the 128 for it because lots of Lexar cards went out of stock as soon as they announced their impending closure and I couldn't buy a 64 at a price much lower than the 128.)

While I was at it, I ordered a Lexar USB3 dual-slot reader for US$34. (Please excuse dust - I'd had the thing out of the factory packaging for about 20 seconds when I took the shot, honest!)




I have a variety of older USB2 card readers, but my favourite has long been a Lexar multi-card one which is compact, inexpensive, and particularly well-designed insofar as it pops up out of a little case for use and can be popped down again for storage, thus avoiding getting the slots clogged up with dust and fluff out laptop bags. Here it is alongside the new one.




The new one is finished in impractical black for reasons of fashion at the cost of utility - white is a vastly more practical colour as you can read markings and see slots and so on much more easily. And it doesn't show the dust. But there isn't much to see on a flash card reader, so let that pass.

Notice the nice, small size: just big enough to have an SD slot and a CF slot without cramming. Notice also that it doesn't bother with all the useless, confusing slots for 16,937 different sorts of obsolete, non-standard rubbish cards like XD and Sony Memory Stick and every other damn thing: just the ones you need. Full marks for that.

In use, it is much, much faster than any USB2 reader, of course. They claim it is also faster than most USB3 readers, which is doubtless true. It is noticeable how much difference there was when reading different cards: the new 1066x Lexar with the 7D II images was clearly faster to read than the slightly smaller images on the ancient 16GB Sandisk Extreme IV I used for trying out my newly repaired 7D.

Anyway, overall, I'm very pleased with the Lexar reader and happily recommend it.

(Disclaimer: B&H paid me US$500 to write this mini-review ... but only in my dreams.)