Review: Kingston 512MB CF Card

David Dorn pitches Kingston's half gig Compact Flash squarely against IBM's Gig Microdrive

Product	512Mb CF card
Company	Kingston
Web	www.kingston.com
Price	£351
We like	Size, speed, capacity
We don't like	Price
Rating	7/10
Requirements

I've had a Kingston CF/512 half Gigabyte Compact Flash card in my possession for a few days now, the aim being to check it out against an IBM Microdrive for two main things: speed of use and battery drain.

Now, while the former may not seem all that significant (although it is) the latter most certainly is. Digital cameras do tend to suck the electrons out of batteries at the kind of speeds you'd wish our downhill skiers could achieve, and in order to conserve the little powerhouses, every last drop of conservation technique that can be applied needs to be.

If that means that a CF card has a lower power drain, then it's a tool worth considering. Strangely, the speed thing comes into play here, too, but in a subtle way. It's more important, in my view, though, for those situations where you need your camera to be ready for the next picture very quickly.

Tests

In order to check it out, I used the time honoured "how many huge pictures can I take before the batteries run out" method of determining the real-life current drain for both cards. In general, I can drain batteries before a card is full if the LCD screen is in "always on" mode. In order to keep things fair, I've used the same Canon D30 camera, same lens, manual focus and exactly the same scene (and trust me, it's been very boring taking the same photo hundreds of times...)

Likewise speed - setting the camera to continuous shooting, I've fired off countless sequences of nine shots, timing each one, and every time setting the camera to record in uncompressed RAW mode (the very largest file size).

Results.

I've gone bog-eyed over this, looking for differences that, if they exist at all, are so small as to be completely insignificant. I cannot discern any practical, real-world difference between the speed or current drain of the two devices. There is a very slightly longer spin-up time on the Microdrive when first the camera is powered up - but it is only slight - less than a second, and, again, hardly noticeable.

So, which to recommend - which would I go for? For my own purposes, I'd have to plump for the Microdrive. For well under £300 these days (I've seen kits at £266) you get a full Gigabyte of storage at the same speeds and current drain as you would a CF card. That's got to be worth having over the £351 for the Kingston half Gig card (and that's the best price I could find).

There is, however, a gotcha, sort of. What do you do if your digital camera doesn't support IBM Microdrives?

Well, in that case, you're stuck - you've got to go the solid state route. If I was buying a new camera today, I'd be checking that it would accept Microdrives - and the same applies to card-accepting printers, and, indeed, any other peripheral that you'd use with your camera.

But for those that are not buying a new camera, £351 seems a tad expensive for 512MB of digital film. I think I'd be checking out the prices on more mainstream CF card sizes, and perhaps carrying multiple cards. That said, though, 512MB is a very handy size - it's at least a holiday's worth of storage for most folks.

Verdict

So, to sum up. If you can use them, IBM Microdrives are better value for money, and they're not going to impact on your battery life any worse than any other form of camera memory. If you can't, then you've going to have to bite the bullet and accept the premium that using solid state CF cards carries for you. If you fall into the latter group, then I can't find anything to criticise about the Kingston card - yes, it's expensive - but that's true of all solid state CF cards.

 

David Dorn