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Kingston Goes 266x with Their Ultimate CF Cards

2,4 and 8GB capacities

Jul 24, 2007 08:18 GMT  ·  By
The Ultimate 266x cards
   The Ultimate 266x cards

Yet another compact flash manufacturer revamps its professional lineup aimed at photographers who shoot a lot of bursts and thus require high transfer rates. This time it's Kingston's turn and the new products are the CompactFlash Ultimate 266x cards, with 45MB/sec. read rate and 40MB/sec. write rate.

"Photographers using digital SLR cameras are looking for faster card write speeds to capture life's moments as they happen without interruption," said Mark Akoubian, Flash memory product manager, Kingston. "Kingston's new CompactFlash Ultimate 266X memory cards maximize a digital camera's performance, delivering the speed and capacity necessary to complete even the most challenging assignments."

Of course, you won't reach that speed in real life, but it's still a significant improvement over the company's 133x CompactFlash Elite Pro series.

The Kingston Ultimate 266x cards come in 2, 4 and 8GB capacities, but a personal recommendation is to purchase several 2GB units and skip the 8GB ones. The reason for this is to avoid losing all your data in case of hardware failure. If one of your cards has a problem, you just use the other ones, but if you only have one 8GB unit, you're stuck.

SanDisk also announced a slightly improved version of the Extreme IV units in the form of the Extreme Ducati Edition CompactFlash, albeit this was more of a cosmetic revamping rather than a substantial technological breakthrough.

As for pricing, the 2GB CF will be available for around $83.00, while the 4GB and 8GB versions will be priced at $144 and $280, respectively.

And since we're talking about CFs, it's worth mentioning that the CompactFlash Association has plans for a new generations of cards that will boast a SATA interface. Today's cards feature the PATA (parallel ATA) interface that is limited to 133MB/second. The implementation of the SATA standard would allow professional products to reach even higher transfer rates, albeit devices like digital SLRs would also require modifications.

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