Full Review

10 September 2007 - While CompactFlash cards are as about exciting as spending an hour in a small room with Johnny Vaughan, they are none the less an important facet in the professional photographers arsenal of kit.

The Kingston CompactFlash Ultimate 266X is the latest card from Kingston and promises to improve speeds over slower cards.

Why would you want the improved speed? Well the faster you can save to your card the quicker you can get on with saving another picture and it's here the 266X element of that product title is important.

That 266 means that you can read data upto 45MB/sec and write it at 40MB/sec.

To put that in English it means that if your camera is capable you can write about 6 images a second on a 10 megapixel camera.

Keeping with the image focus Kingston also bundles in a data recovery package from MediaRECOVER.

The software, which works on both Mac and PC lets you can recover lost or deleted files and restore corrupt files it need be.

Easy to use, its not the reason you should be investing by a nice little package on the side.

VERDICT
Okay, so getting a CompactFlash card that is slightly faster than the previous one you had is taking things to the extreme, however in our tests against considerably older cards and we noticed a big difference in the speed the camera was ready to snap again.

Of course if your camera is old and slow then this card probably won't make a difference, but its worth checking out none the less.