SanDisk Extreme III 4 GB SD Card Review

SanDisk have updated their Extreme III range of high-performance Secure Digital cards. These cards have been designed specifically with the professional photographer in mind and are available in several sizes starting including 1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB. There are also plans to release 8 GB and 16 GB in the near future. The card we are looking at today is the top of the line 4 GB SanDisk Extreme III SD Card.

SanDisk are very proud of their new card and make some impressive claims for the SD card III series. This should be the case as this is the top of the line of their current crop of SD Card products.

The basic statistics for these cards are impressive and Sandisk are stating a minimum read and write time of 20 MB/sec. This is one of the fastest times we have come across for any type of memory card including Flash Cards, Memory Stick Pros and SD Cards. They way the Memory Cards manages this feat is by the use of a technology called ESP or Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing Technology. ESP uses advanced 32-bit RISC processing and cutting edge algorithms.

They worked very closely with many of the major camera manufacturers to ensure the technology was suitable for the targeted SD Card market. ESP has an accelerated flash data bus architecture and super-parallel write and read operations and this should allow data to be transferred at twice to three times the rate of most competitive SD Cards.

It's a bit of a mouthful but seems to be affective at crunching the bytes. One of the other main features of this SD Card is that SanDisk has worked hard on ensuring durability and reliability in relation to the Extreme III range and have tested the cards in very extreme conditions from -13 to +185 degrees Fahrenheit. So in theory if you have the urge to take photographs of the inside of your freezer or spend much time photographing Death Valley then this is the card for you.

Another great point of this SD Card is that SanDisk provide you with a lifetime warranty and instant replacement for any faulty product. It is also tested for vibration durability as well.

The test we completed on the 4GB SanDisk Extreme III SD Card proved that the technology applied by SanDisk is doing the job very well. It more than holds it's own against the like of Panasonic and Sony and is around 35% - 40% faster than most of the equivalent SD Cards on the market.

In our day-to-day tests the Extreme III SD Card proved extremely quick in everyday use. The syncing of large files to the SD Card especially showed the cards market leading speed in write performance. To put this into perspective, files of 200 KB or so flash by in an instant so quickly you barely have time to read the name of the file on the screen. Transferring larger files from hard drives to the card was just a quick, you can easily run music files without any drop or loss in quality in the background while doing other tasks.

Pros: Outstanding performance and reliability especially when writing data to the SD Card and don't forget that lifetime warranty.

Cons: Not many but I guess it is a little on the expensive side when compare to other SD Card suppliers and formats.

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