While storage capacities of memory card have been rising steadily over the years, memory speeds are sometimes overlooked. Traditionally, large-capacity cards came with a speed penalty as the upper limits of the technology of the time were reached. High speed products are expensive and exclusive products, usually marketed towards professional photographic use. The Kingston Ultimate CF is such a card, rated at 133X and takes up to 8GB of storage in our review unit. The large capacity makes sense as even 10 megapixel photo sensors are becoming common in consumer products. It is especially important in professional DSLR cameras that shoot huge RAW or TIFF files. Unlike high capacity SDHC cards, which require special SDHC equipment, the large 8GB CF cards can be used in any device that support FAT32 formatting.
The 133X rating equates to just under 20MB/s transfer rates. Our tests on the Kingston Ultimate CF turned up results of 18.7MB/s read and 18.4MB/s write speeds. The results were actually the real-world limits of the USB2.0 High Speed reader we used to conduct the tests, so it’s likely that the card is actually capable of at least the rated speed. Besides professional photographic equipment, finding card readers that fully take advantage of such speeds is another matter altogether. At 18MB/s, you can transfer 1GB of data in about 55 seconds, which is pretty good for a memory card. As with most modern memory cards, our tests showed no speed degradation as the 8GBs were being filled to the brim.
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