LEXAR PROFESSIONAL
133x w/ Write Acceleration

Lexar Media, one of the world’s top manufacturers of portable digital storage media, has once again announced the release of an even faster performing series of Compact Flash and Secure Digital memory cards. Available in a variety of capacities from 1GB to 4GB, these new cards are clearly aimed at the professional photography market and as a direct competitor to SanDisk’s Ultra Extreme II cards.

According to Lexar’s own terminology, ‘1x’ is equal to 150KB/sec. So in other words, the new 133x cards run theoretically at 20MB/sec. I personally feel it is a little misleading to be quoting exact read/write attributes when talking about digital media as the storage media’s performance is going to depend greatly on what device one uses it in. Using the new 133x Lexar cards in a top of the line digital SLR is going to yield vastly different speeds then if one uses it in a low level point and shoot.

Putting that aside however, after testing a 133x Compact Flash in my Canon 20D Digital SLR, I can safely say that they are just as fast, if not faster, then SanDisk’s Ultra Extreme II cards and noticeably improved over Lexar’s older 80x models.

Simply for the sake of pushing the card to its maximum potential, I used it while on a photo shoot that required the model to do a series of cartwheels across the shooting plane. I managed to burst off a large number of sequential frames in RAW mode before I was forced to take a break. Upon review the images appeared quickly and I was able to flip through them with minimal load time.

I’ll leave exact speed and benchmark tests to more technical oriented reviews, however if you are a professional or advanced amateur in need of a storage card that can handle large RAW files with minimal buffer lag then Lexar’s latest offering will fit the bill perfectly.