Panasonic 512 MB Secure Digital Card

Rating:
Summary: Best SD card on the market
Review: I own a Garmin iQue 3600 PDA, a Palm OS type. I've been a member of their users' group for over a year and one of the most intense discussions has been on the fastest and most reliable SD cards to buy. You do not want all your data to go down the drain due to a faulty card. You also want all your data fast, waiting for a slow screen redraw due to a slow card is no fun.

Every available SD card on the market has been tested multiple times by the members using VFSMark, a speed measuring program for Palm OS PDA's. In brief, there's no contest - the Panasonic 254Meg and 512Meg cards proved to be the fastest and the most reliable SD cards on the market, especially in write speed, critical for a camera card. The Toshiba cards (for example, some Dane-Elec, PNY) are 15x slower in write mode but read almost 2x faster than the Panasonic). It seems that the Toshiba cards aimed at fast read times at the expense of slow write times.

I just bought a FZ20 for Christmas and need a bigger SD card From my experience on the PDA forum and the hundreds of test done by the members on all types of cards (literally), I am buying the Panasonic 512Meg for $89.99.

I figure that the write speed is the most important number in the card specs for camera owners. The faster the card write speed, the faster the camera can take another picture. Unfortunately, you can't believe the manufacturer specs, we found many differences between the published specs and the actual performance in the VFSMark program which measures 9 aspects of card performance, one of which is write speed. The SanDisk cards were slow and had a high hit rate for problems with people on the forum. The SanDisk Ultra cards were as fast as the Panasonics (or faster in some cases) but some members of the forum had problems with them going bad and losing data.

In summary, the Panasonic 512 and 256 cards proved to be the most reliable as well as the fastest as found by the users of the iQue 3600 forum.

Rating:
Summary: High-capacity card with many capabilities.
Review: I recently purchased the 512 MB SD card, as I have owned other Panasonic SD cards and I am most impressed with this one. You can not image how much information can be written to this card! I can pile as many pictures as I want and almost never have to worry about it using up all the memory because it can store up to 7,000 JPegs. Also, you can put 11 hours of songs from your MP3 player on it. I like the fact the SD cards are compatible with many of my products, and that I can store information in different formats such as audio and still pictures. I highly recommend the Panasonic 512 SD card to anyone looking for a new MultiMedia card.

Rating:
Summary: Toooo Expensive
Review: Too expensive, when you can get similar high quality products from other manufacturers.