This card holds about 2,100 RAW or 4,300 JPEG Fine images from a 12-megapixel camera, or about 13 hours of SD and 4 hours of HD video, allowing you (in most cases) to shoot all day without offloading or switching cards. I shot about 8,000 RAW images and six hours of HD video with my Nikon D90 and Canon HF10 cameras, taking this card through about 40 offloading cycles with no errors or corruption. The best part about this card, however, is its capacity. The convenience of being able to go out to a sports shoot and fire off pictures and video the whole event without switching cards is a beautiful thing.

Though not the subjects of this review, a couple of our in-house editors tested other cards from PNY: the 16GB Optima Pro Secure Digital High Capacity and the 8GB Optima Pro UDMA CompactFlash Ultra High Speed cards. The editors report: “The write speed is fast, the cards are solid, and the 16GB card holds 560 RAW files from the 14.7-megapixel Canon G10. The 8GB card holds about 1,400 RAW images from a 6.1-megapixel Nikon D70s. The cards were error-free and transparent, meaning we didn’t think about the cards at all because they simply worked.”

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10

This review is brought to your courtesy of Layers Magazine.