Samsung MB-SP8GEU 8GB SDHC PLUS Class 6 Extreme Speed Memory Card

I am a sports photographer and as such I do need a SD card which can keep up with me shooting at high speed without the buffer getting full or the card not being fast enough. Its always the best shoots that you seem to miss when the buffer fills or the card fails.

I was very presently surprised with this card. I tested the card at a Northampton Town Yth v Southend United Yth game in a Nikon D90. I alternated between that camera and my D£ so as to cover myself if the card failed. I need not of worried as it coped well.

I would say that you do need a camera buffer which can cope with the shots at 6 fames per second as even if the card can cope the camera buffer will fill and you will be in limbo not being able to take images whilst the buffer sends the info to the card so to test the SD card properly you do need a camera with a decent fast buffer. I would suggest that the Nikon D90, D3000, D7000 and D700 in the Nikon range and the Higher end Canons and Sony's should fit the bill here.

I first tested the card with taking shots of RAW images of the players initially. These are very large files of 11-13 megabytes and as such you are transferring a lot of image data with each shot and this will slow down the camera. Notwithstanding the buffer and card were allowing 7 images in bursts to be taken and whilst this meant I could not take more than 7 shots continuously without the camera slowing in RAW mode for portraits that was pretty impressive and not far behind the Flashcards I use in my high-end Nikon D3.

The smaller the images you are taking the faster the buffer and SD card work and from large Jpegs I got 17 images in the buffer before the camera slowed and a very impressive 31 in small image mode where in effect I rarely had the slow camera buffer problem. Downside to this is that the images being smaller 2-4 mgs meant that they had limited use for large images but all in all since most people are looking to put their images on the likes of Flickr, Facebook or websites this is more than adequate.

All in all I was impressed and would certainly consider these alongside the Lexar and sanDisks I am using. the only test I could not perform is that of longevity. I will however, update the review after a few months of use and over the longer term.

As a pro photographer, I am always on the look out for reliable kit and nothing needs to be more reliable in today's digital age than your memory device. Here Samsung have lifted the benchmark. These cards are truly superb cards. Reliable and fast. I completely recommend them to you and at this price they represent a great deal, especially when compared against my old favourite Lexar.

This is the standard size SD card, but is said to be far more sturdy than the average SD card.

The company boasts that the card is epoxy coated and will stand up to:

- emersion in water
- x-rays
- magnetism
- damage from dust
- bumping and banging
- twisting and bending
- heat
- cold
- can take the average weight of an adult
- is designed to stand up to 50G (gravitational pull)

I have no intention of testing most of these even though the SD card comes with a 10 year warranty and if it does go wrong I will be contacting Samsung for assistance.

It does not come with the usual a protective case, but if you have cases from other cards you can swap your cards over as you use them.

The information with the card states that it stores 8 GBs of information meaning 2000 photos, 2 hours of HD video and 140 hours of music. Strangely when I put it in my camera (Kodak Easy Share M341 - Kodak M341 12 Megapixel Digital Camera - Silver) and checked it gave me 3471 photo spaces on the card (not including the internal memory of the camera), but only gave me 80 minutes video capability - I don't use SD cards for music so I can't comment on that.

I took 150 photos with this card and 150 with the Kodak 8GB (Kodak 8GB SD Card - Class 2) I usually use - I then timed the download and the Samsung was 28 seconds faster - that's nearly 2 second per photograph faster than the Kodak one..

This appears to be a step forward for SD cards, a strong resistant card that can store your photographs and videos until you download them onto your computer.