However, I was pleasantly surprised to see the card was a Dane-Elec. I’ve purchased DE flash cards over the years and have had good experience with them. I believe Dane-Elec is a respected, relatively large European manufacturer of flash memory. However, I assumed that this card, a type 4, would be super slow.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it keeps up with my XSI just fine. Although the Rebel is no speed demon, rated at 3.5 fps, the DE card had no problem meeting that rating while shooting in camera raw! This factoid is significant because a raw 12 megapixel file can be 18-20MB plus the jpg means that the card must read as much as 23MB of data for every picture taken. Now, I don’t know how big the camera’s buffer is. If it is 100MB or more, then the card speed probably doesn’t matter. However, this card hasn’t slowed me down.

One surprising aspect of this card is its speed relative to the Transcend 8GB card that I purchased. I assumed that the DE would be at best on par with the Transcend, Type 6, and maybe a bit slower. The reverse was true. In an entirely unscientific test, my computer wrote to the DE more than twice as fast as it did to the Transcend (8-10MB/sec versus 4-5MB/sec). The reads were on par with both cards peaking at about 15MB/sec.

Overall, the card represents a very good value. Currently, their prices are very close. If I were to buy more cards, I would choose the DE.