Most people will buy a Secure Digital (SD) card for use in their digital camera. And you might think that you must buy the very fastest memory card on the market. Doing so can be wasting money, though. Such is the case when the digicam you are using would not take advantage of the fastest speed. Finding out whether the digicam is above or below this threshold is difficult without testing each memory card in the digicam. The easiest (but not the perfect) way is to look at the continuous drive or burst mode speed. Burst mode is how fast the digicam will capture one image after another. If your digicam's burst mode is less than 3 frames per second (fps), then don't buy the fastest flash memory card. However, if your digicam is a digital SLR or has a burst mode of 3fps or faster, we recommend a faster flash card of at least 133x.

Currently SanDisk's Ultra II Secure Digital card is not the fastest, with a minimum sustained write speed of 9 megabytes (MB) per second and a read speed of 10MB per second, or 60x and 66x respectively. Click here for SanDisk's specs page.

If you find yourself in a position to decide between two similar devices, one using Compact Flash (CF) and one using SD, go with the SD. Comparing CF to SD, CF has much higher power requirements (3.3V or 5V) versus SD which is only 2.7V or 3.6V.

One reason we like the SanDisk Ultra II is SanDisk's lifetime limited warranty. But what good is a lifetime warranty if the maker is out of business? Another reason we recommend the SanDisk Ultra II SD card is SanDisk's reputation. SanDisk is a solid, publicly traded company, in fact the pioneer in flash memory, the kind used in SD memory cards. It was founded in 1988, and is now the world's largest supplier of flash memory data storage products. You can read more information on SanDisk at http://www.SanDisk.com.

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Where to buy the SanDisk Ultra II Secure Digital memory card
Computers4Sure
CyberGuys!
(with USB) JR.com