Home > Consumer Reviews > Lexar Professional Series UDMA 16 GB 300x CompactFlash Memory Card CF16GB-300-381

I'm a photojournalist who bought the Lexar 16 gig UDMA card for my new Canon 5D Mark II. I've had occasion to use the card on a variety of assignments and for spot news during the Stanford Financial meltdown.

The card is perfect, never a hint of bogging down or image corruption no matter how fast I shoot. This is partly due to the camera, of course, but the fast write speed of the Lexar keeps up when shooting those massive 21 megapixel images or high def video. I also appreciate that Lexar lets you download "Image Rescue 3" for free when you buy the card.

Don't waste your money if you are using an older or "prosumer" camera; they probably will perform the same with a card costing half the price. Lexar designed this pricey bad boy for high-end pro cameras.

As in my review of the generally similar Kingston Ultimate 266x card in the 16GB capacity, I use these high-speed cards, as opposed to the 133x class, in order to maintain as much shooting speed as possible without getting halted by buffer fills. This Lexar card serves well, as all Lexars have for me, with never a problem of data corruption or formatting quirks. I gave it four stars instead of five only because it costs so much more than the Kingston Ultimate, though I cannot perceive a performance difference, despite the fact that 300x implies more speed than 266x. No doubt the Lexar product is carrying a "name-recognition fee" due to the loyalty of professional shooters. I *can* say that either one is definitely better than the 133x-class cards in accepting a long burst of shots from my Canon 5D.

I bought this card for my Canon EOS 5D MKII because my Extreme IV Ducatti Sandisks were having trouble keeping up with the HD video recording rate of the camera and the movie recording would slow down in the middle of a scene. The Lexar 16 GB UDMA delivers the speed I need to keep the video recording smooth from beginning to end. [...]

I've been using the 4s and 8s, and this is my first 16. It works like the others, but of course more pics per card. The high res cameras can fill cards pretty fast. Like the ones before, this works great. I don't notice a large benefit from the UDMA, but I assume it's there in the backgroud making transfers go a little faster.

I bought this card to use in my Canon 5D Mark II, which requires not only a lot of space to save large images, but also consistently fast write speeds for video.

If like me, you're weighing a name brand card like this Lexar vs. a cheap alternative. After all, other brands are available for less than half the price of this card. However, this price isn't just a brand premium -- this card really performs. With UDMA support (any device that can read/write a CF card will work with this card, but devices that support UDMA will do so faster) in my camera, I see a very big difference between this card and even my older "pro" level CF cards.

Compared to the older pro cards I have with 100x - 133x write speed, this card (rated 300x) really is about 3 times faster. Compared to a few cheap cards that claim to be 100-133x, this card is 6 times faster.

It's too soon for me to give a reliability rating for this card -- but given the card lives up to its claims for speed, I'm willing to bet my images and video on its reliability. And that's exactly what you'll likely be doing too!