I’ve been helping Nick slug through the new inventory list for the website (staff shortages the past couple of weeks and internet interruptions have made it something of a mess to catch up on), and hidden in there I found this little gem:

Kingston’s Elite Pro 133x Compact Flash Card – $24.97

Now, as you probably don’t know, the 4GB version of this card has been the staple of my shooting for the past year (I currently have two of them). Running at about 20 megabytes/second (133 x 1.5 kb/s = 199.5 = 19.95 mb/s, close enough for me), they’re fast enough for me to chug 10mb raw files at 5 frames per second for about 14 shots, and if I lay off the continuous drive it’ll clear the buffer in about 10-20 seconds I’m off again. Probably not for sportsshooters, but for your everyday joe that’s plenty fast enough.

And, while Kingston plays third fiddle to Sandisk and Lexar’s reputations it seems, their cards are certainly reliable in my experience (again, used two of them exclusively for a year, they’ve survived my washing machine and my attrocious habit of hot-swapping them in and out of readers and cameras.)

And, they’re 25 friggin’ bucks. You know that’s a nice price. A year ago I paid 40 bucks for the 4 GB one.