The Extreme IV series from SanDisk offers some serious speed. Could it establish itself as a valuable tool for the trigger-happy shutter-bug?

Anyway... what a tag line... "offers some serious speed". Compared to what? In the past Toms Hardware actually used to compare products against other products, but in this case you simply compared this product to the other product in the same family that is one step down, and as usual for Toms Hardware, this reads more as an advertisement than as an actual article.

What, getting paid to post 'articles' now?

A product one step down would be the Extreme III, but on the graphs its just "Extreme" - which I haven't seen in stores in a long time. The "Extreme" you put there looks like it might be the Extreme II cards w/ specs at 20MB/s.

Anywho, only professionals or high end pro-sumers really need this card for shooting with high res RAWs, or if they're shooting sequential shots in a high-speed setting.
I suppose anyone who's looking to move data quick from card to computer would have a use for it too.

Agreed

The same studies are done when evaluating generations of Intel, AMD, Maxtor, WD, Samsung and others. THG was seeing if the latest generation of SanDisk CF drives were truely faster and provided shutterbugs like me a real added value in our D-SLR cameras & other CF devices. If you consider a read speed increase of 52% and a write speed increase of over 16% vs. the earlier generation, THAT IS a serious speed increase.

Again, you'll see the same thing when looking at new generations of any product. Reviews will compare it to the previous generation to see how it fares.

If you disagree, provide a constructive and fair suggestion of what THG should do to make it a better article. Complaining without a sincere way to improve it doesn't help change anything.

Well let's look at what you pointed out... first, not true. When comparing processors or hard drives, Toms Hardware normally puts up charts that compare the new item from a manufacturer to current models from all sorts of manufacturers:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/1 [...] page6.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] html#games

So no, with other products they actually provide USEFUL numbers. Now you say these numbers are useful, because there is a 52% increase? Well, that is if you believed that the previous generation was the fastest. What if there is another product from another manufacturer that was 60% faster, and this new model is actually 8% slower than a model from another manufacturer? You don't know because you don't have any real numbers for the competition. That makes the numbers that they provided virtually useless.

Whoopie, the product from this manufacturer is faster than their old product... but is it faster than the competition? Who knows.

That is the summation of this article, and I am sorry, but that is nothing more than a press release. I did give useful criticism, I said compare it to OTHER products. And that is what I am still saying. Do like they do with processors and hard drives and motherboards and other products.

Toms used to do that all the time, you would be hard-pressed to find fluff pieces like this. In the last 3 years, especially, but even to some degree for the two before that, Toms has started posting 'articles' that are nothing more than fluff. I just point that out when they do because this kind of garbage reporting is the kind of trash that you could probably find on MSNBC from that neophyte Gary Krakow... actually no, they may provide more information, and that is sad.

Rob Galbraith of robgalbraith.com posted a decent summary of these cards the day they were officially released back in July. His article can be found here:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/c [...] -7896-8475

There is also a very useful CF/SD card database at robgalbraith.com that compares the write speed of numerous cards in various popular professional and prosumer SLR cameras:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/m [...] p?cid=6007

And also in the card database, there's a comparision of read speeds using various card readers:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/n [...] =6007-8471 (for CF cards - there's also one for SD cards)

Hope this helps anyone looking for more in-depth information.

Ron

Now THERE is a review. That is the kind of material that Toms used to be known for... not just writing articles that could be written by a neophyte journalist who is reading the company website for the product.

I could let this go as an "informative" article showing how important faster memory cards are if the author hadn't added his unsubstantiate option.

compared to what competition?

Damn man at least steal someone else's work if you're too lazy to do your own.

"7/10/2006

'Did you know Maxtor ATA100 drives are 33% faster then Maxtor ATA66 Drives. '
"


This basic example of an artical fails to mention the fact that ATA133 is the new standard for PATA drives... or the fact that SATA 1/2 drives are out and perform @ ATA150 and ATA300.


Had I only read this artical, I would have only known to buy Maxtors ATA100 drives, because the artical did not benchmark the results across similar technology.

Faster is a relitive term that, when compaired old technology.... means SQUATTT. I could have read Toms artical right off San's website and it would have been more honest in the articals intent.

The ATA 100 drives were not at all faster when they first came out, increasing the theoretical maximum of the interface does not touch the performance of the drive until the limiting factor is the interface. The article actually showed the memory cards on the newer interface performed better.

All of which does not change the fact the author did basically no research and still gave an opinion that what he looked at was better than everything else.

Since I too, did no research, I did not include the actual rates and improvement curves between ata 66 and 100, and how they differ between manufacturers.