On Thursday, Nov 6, 2003, at 11:35 America/New_York, Joseph Tainter wrote:
Along with the starkistdee I bought a Lexar 1 GB 40X compact card, which comes with its own USB reader. Therein lies a tale.
I wanted to know how much speed-up I would get from using a WA-enabled Lexar card in the *ist-D. I talked to a guy at the Lexar booth at Photo-Plus East Photo-Plus East. He didn't know but he pointed me to John Omvik. I asked John if he had looked at the compact-flash benchmarks for the *ist-D on the Rob Galbraith web site (where the WA-enabled cards did not rank high on the chart). He said he had not. I then asked him if Lexar had conducted any internal benchmarks on the *ist-D. Based on his informal estimates, he said there was a 5% performance improvement using a WA-enabled card over one without WA (Rob Galbraith's chart actually shows the opposite). He could not confirm if Pentax and/or Lexar was working to improve the WA speedup in future firmware upgrades.
He also pointed out the advantages of having Image Rescue and good support for professional photographers from Lexar, and showed me a new Firewire card reader that would be out soon. Could it be that Lexar has a separate hotline for photographers?
--jc
