While virtually every digital camera of note needs a memory card, those cards can let you down if they are not fast enough. ATP reckons its CF cards are the fastest ones on the market.

CompactFlash card differ from others as the drive interface electronics are inside, making them physically larger. The card can be used in any camera or card reader that support the CF II format. So far, that has been the best you could get from a card itself. But now the latest development in these cards is Ultra Direct Memory Access (or UDMA). This offers speeds up to 45Mb/s or 300 times the speed you'd get from normal cards.

ATP are one of the major memory card vendors and sent us the ATP ProMax II 4Gb 300x CompactFlash card to see if it made for faster pictures on our camera, (or at least allow us to mimic the opening  of Grls on Film by Duran Duan).

We compared the card a 1GB SanDisk Extreme III CF card. Both managed to step up the amount of pictures we were able to take. The action mode of our Canon 350D managed to take taking shot after shot afer shot with no problem at all.

Really, where the ATP ProMax II stands out is transferring pix from our card reader to our Apple Mac computer. Transferring 100 pictures from the card to the computer was amazingly fast for the ProMax II (Although the Extreme III is also quite fast but has less storage).

Astoundingly, the card managed to vastly speed up the time it took to transfer data from the camera to the computer (which always seems to take forever).  Thankfully, the ProMax II pumped in the files without us  feeling that we were growing old.

If you want a great card, that's fast and has high capacity, this CompactFlash card fits the bill. And it's much cheaper than SanDisk.

Rating: 9/10