Lexar 16GB 300x speed Professional UDMA Compact Flash. Ref: LEXAR-0185

Price: £58.88 (£69.18 Including VAT)
Stock Level: 5 or more in stock.

Lexar 16GB 300x UDMA Compact Flash Card

Product Highlights:

Maximum high-speed UDMA performance and reliability
Dramatically improves transfer speeds from card to computer*
Includes Image Rescue™ 3 software to recover lost or deleted photo, video, and audio files**
Limited lifetime warranty
Lexar Part Number : CF16GB-300-386

Professional-Level UDMA Memory Technology.
The Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CompactFlash® memory card provides ultimate high-speed performance and reliability for advanced photo enthusiasts and professional photographers. The card dramatically increases card-to-computer transfer rates when paired with a UDMA-enabled reader, as well as provides support for the next generation of high-resolution UDMA-enabled digital SLR (DSLR) cameras.

Blazing Card-to-Computer Download Speed.
The Lexar Professional UDMA CF card offers the ultimate performance available when used with a UDMA-enabled device. The card delivers incredibly fast download speeds to satisfy the demand for faster transfer rates from card to computer, drastically reducing post-production time. These cards deliver industry—leading read/write speeds with a minimum sustained write speed capability of a blazing 300x (45MB/sec) in all capacities.*

Includes Valuable Extras.
The Lexar Professional UDMA CF card includes Lexar Image Rescue™ 3 software, which reliably recovers most photo, video, and audio files, even if they've been erased or the card has been corrupted.** The software can also reformat the card, securely delete images, and report on the overall condition of the card, so you can ensure it's in perfect working order for your next shoot. Software is available for free download with purchase of the card.

Unmatched Performance and Reliability.
The advanced technology and blazing speed of the Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CF card drastically improves download time, and also leverages the power of the next generation of UDMA-enabled DSLR cameras. With large capacities and valuable software, the Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CF card provides advanced memory card performance so you can focus on your photography.

High-Speed Cards: Why They Matter

With so many options available in the world of digital photography, it can be daunting making sense of all the choices. With memory cards offered at different capacities and speed-ratings (and some with no speed-rating at all), how can you decide what's ideal for you and your type of photography?

The answer is this: speed-rated cards are a smart investment for all photographers and offer a wide range of capabilities. A high-speed memory card can enhance in-camera performance, especially for photographers who take a multitude of pictures, use the video option on their camera, or have the need to shoot photos in quick succession. The true benefit, however, is in post-production work, where transfer speeds can be greatly accelerated and wait times significantly reduced.

The Perks of High Speed

Lexar Professional speed rated cards.
By definition, high-speed memory cards are designed to perform faster. A speed rating means that each card is tested and guaranteed to be at least as fast as its stated rating. It also means that the camera can write to the card faster, and that fast readers can perform downloads from the camera faster. Lexar Professional cards are speed rated and come in standardised increments such as 40x, 80x, and 133x. The X represents the transfer rate, and 1x means the card can perform data transfer at 150 KiloBytes (KB) per second. This is important to know because you can match the capabilities of your camera and your needs as a photographer to the speed of card that's appropriate for your level of use.

Capacity and workflow.
These are two key benefits of a high-speed memory card. Not only are you able to increase the number of photos you take, but you can improve on the speed in which you take them. While using a high-capacity card greatly reduce the need to stop and change cards frequently, a high-speed card is important if you are photographing a fast-paced sporting event or an important occasion.

More importantly, high-speed memory cards make a huge difference in post-production work. With transfer rates and upload times significantly reduced, photographers enjoy a huge time savings. This gives professional photographers more time for photo editing, working on other projects, and promoting their business.

The Need for Speed

Whether you're a budding photographer or a seasoned pro, there are many reasons for adding a high-speed memory card to your arsenal. Besides enhancing in-camera functions and greatly reducing photo transfer time, you get the added enhancements of security and memory features that make selecting a high-speed memory card an easy choice. If you're not using a speed-rated memory card, now's the time to make the switch!

Lexar Professional memory cards: Designed for High-Speed Performance and Superior Reliability

Lexar offers a full line of high-speed memory cards, ideal for prosumers and professionals who demand optimal performance from both the memory card and digital SLR camera they use.

All Lexar Professional and Platinum level memory cards come with a lifetime warranty and full technical support. The Professional line of cards also includes the added benefit of a dedicated technical support line for immediate, specialised assistance.

*When used in conjunction with a UDMA-enabled reader.
**Image or other data recovery is not 100% guaranteed.
***Software offerings may vary depending on product ship date and store. Please check product packaging for included software offerings.

DISCLAIMERS:
The Lexar "x" speed rating describes minimum write speed capability where x=150KB/sec sustained write speed.
Actual usable memory capacity may vary. 1MB equals 1 million bytes; 1GB equals 1 billion bytes.

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What is Compact Flash?

Compact Flash typically uses flash memory in a standardised enclosure. The format was first specified and produced by SanDisk in 1994. The physical format is now used for a variety of devices.

Compact Flash became a popular storage medium for digital cameras. In recent years it has been widely replaced by smaller cards on the consumer end, but it is still a preferred format for D-SLR cameras, for its superior capacity and reliability.

Description

There are two main subdivisions of CF cards, Type I (3.3 mm thick) and the thicker Type II (CF2) cards (5 mm thick). The CF Type II slot is used by Microdrives and some other devices. There are four main speeds of cards including the original CF, CF High Speed (using CF+/CF2.0), a faster CF 3.0 standard and a yet faster CF 4.0 standard that is being adopted as of 2007. The thickness of the CF card type is dictated by the preceding PC Card standard which was used for data storage in previous years.

Compact Flash was originally built around Intel's NOR-based flash memory, but it has switched over to NAND. CF is among the oldest and most successful formats, and has held to a niche in the professional camera market especially well. It has benefited from having both a better cost to memory-size ratio than other formats for much of its life, and generally from having available capacities larger than other formats.
CF cards can be used directly in a PC Card slot with a plug adapter, used as an ATA (IDE) or PCMCIA storage device with a passive adapter or with a reader, or attached various other types of ports such as USB or FireWire. As some newer card types are smaller, they can be used directly in a CF card slot with an adapter. Formats which can be used this way include SD/MMC, Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card in a Type I slot, and SmartMedia in a Type II slot, as of 2005. Some multi-card readers use CF for I/O as well.

Flash memory, regardless of format, can take only a limited number of erase/write cycles to a particular "block" before that block can no longer be written. Typically, the controller in a Compact Flash device attempts to prevent premature wear out of a sector by choosing the location for a piece of data at write time so as to spread out the writing over the device. This process is called wear levelling.

When using Compact Flash in ATA mode as a hard drive replacement, wear levelling becomes critical. The advanced Compact Flash controllers spread the wear-levelling across the entire drive allowing all blocks to participate. The even more advanced Compact Flash controllers will also move the data that is rarely changed so that all blocks are worn evenly.

Techincal Details

NOR-based flash has lower density than newer NAND-based systems, and Compact Flash is therefore the physically largest of the three memory card formats that came out in the early 1990s, the other two being Miniature Card (MiniCard) and SmartMedia (SSFDC). However, CF did switch to NAND type memory later on. The IBM Microdrive format implements the CF Type II interface, but is not solid-state memory.

Compact Flash defines a physical interface which is smaller than, but electrically identical to, the ATA interface. That is, it appears to the host device as if it were a hard disk. The CF device contains an ATA controller. CF devices operate at 3.3 volts or 5 volts, and can be swapped from system to system. CF cards with flash memory are able to cope with extremely rapid changes in temperature. Industrial versions of flash memory cards can operate at a range of −45 to +85 °C.
CF has managed to be the most successful of the early memory card formats, outliving Miniature Card, SmartMedia, and PC Card Type I in mainstream popularity. The memory card formats that came out in the late 1990s through the early 2000s (SD/MMC, various Memory Stick formats, xD-Picture Card, etc.) offered stiff competition. The new formats were significantly smaller than CF, in some cases by an even greater fraction than CF had been smaller than PC Card. These new formats would eventually dominate the memory card market for compact consumer electronic devices.

Speed

Flash memory devices are non-volatile and solid-state, and thus are more robust than disk drives. Cards consume around 5% of the power required by small disk drives and still have reasonable transfer rates of over 45 MB/s for the more expensive 'high speed' cards.

Card speed is usually specified in "x" ratings, e.g. 8x, 20x, 133x. This is the same system used for CD-ROMs and gives the data rate as a multiple of the data rate of the first CD-ROMs (i.e. the data rate of an audio CD). The base rate is 150 kB/s, so for example, 20x = 20 * 150 kB/s = 3.0 MB/s.

File System

There are varying levels of compatibility among FAT32-compatible cameras. While any camera that is claimed to be FAT32-capable is expected to read and write to a FAT32-formatted card without problems, some cameras are tripped up by cards larger than 2 GB that are completely unformatted, while others may take longer time to apply a FAT32 format. For example, the FAT32-compatible Canon EOS-1Ds will format any unformatted card with FAT16, even ones larger than 2 GB.

Indeed, there is a FAT32 bottleneck because of the manner in which many digital cameras update the file system as they write photos to the card. Writing to a FAT32-formatted card generally takes a little longer than writing to a FAT16-formatted card with similar performance capabilities. For instance, the Canon EOS 10D will write the same photo to a FAT16-formatted 2 GB Compact Flash card somewhat faster than to a same speed 4 GB FAT32-formatted Compact Flash card, although the memory chips in both cards have the same write speed specification.

Compact Flash cards are often used instead of hard drives in embedded systems, dumb terminals and various small form-factor PCs that are built for low noise output or power consumption. Compact Flash cards are often more readily available and smaller than purpose-built solid-state drives and can be used to obtain faster seek times than hard drives.

CFast

A future version of Compact Flash, known as CFast, will be based on the Serial ATA bus, rather than the Parallel ATA/IDE bus for which all previous versions of Compact Flash are designed.

These cards will support a higher maximum transfer rate than current Compact Flash cards. As of 2009, SATA supports transfer rates up to 300 MB/s, while PATA is limited to 133 MB/s using UDMA 6. Few, if any, current flash memory device support speeds greater than 133 MB/s, and CFast cards will not be physically or electronically compatible with CF cards, requiring new card readers and new digital cameras to take advantage of them. CFast cards use a 7-pin SATA data connector (identical to the standard SATA connector), but a 17-pin power connector that appears incompatible with the standard 15-pin SATA power connector, so an adaptor will be required to connect CFast cards in place of standard SATA hard drives.

CFast cards are expected to reach market in late 2009. At CES 2009, Pretec showed a 32 GB CFast and announced that they should reach market within a few months.

Type I and Type II

The only difference between the two types is that the Type II devices are 5 mm thick while Type I devices are 3.3 mm thick. The vast majority of all Type II devices are Microdrives and other miniature hard drives. Flash based Type II devices are rare but a few examples do exist. Compact Flash - Secure Digital adapters usually are Type II. Even the largest capacity cards commonly available are Type I cards. Most card readers will read both formats, with the exception of some early CF based cameras or poorer quality USB card readers where the slot is too small. Various Manufacturers of 4GB Compact Flash cards such as Sandisk, Toshiba, Alcotek and Hynix have developed devices which support mainly type I slots. Some latest DSLR's also dropped Type II support.