Product Description

Serious professional photographers who demand one of the fastest, most rugged, and most durable memory cards on the market should choose the SanDisk Extreme III SD card. Built to work under the most challenging conditions, with SanDisk Extreme III you’ll get more speed, better performance, and unmatched reliability.This card features 30MB/s read/write speed.

Product Details

• Brand: SanDisk
• Model: SDCFX3-016G-A31
• Released on: 2006-11-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.64" h x 1.81" w x .16" l, .44 pounds
• CPU: AMD Athlon 1 GHz
• Memory: 128000MB DRAM
• Hard Disk: 1GB
• Processors: 1
• Native resolution: 640x480
• Display size: 669.2913385827

Features

• Super-fast photo capture: Sequential write and read speed for faster capturing and viewing of large image files.
• Extremely fast card-to-computer transfers: Copy image files in no time.
• Advanced ESP technology: Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing provides the fastest speeds and highest performance.
• Shock and weather-resistant: Industrial-grade components, temperature ranges from -13° F to 185° F (-25° C to +85° C).
• Special data recovery software: Comes with RescuePRO® software, an easy way to recover photos that have been accidentally deleted.

From the Manufacturer

SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash is designed for serious professional photographers who demand one of the fastest, most rugged, and most durable memory cards on the market. Professional photographers who work under less than ideal conditions expect more from a flash memory card. More speed. More performance. More reliability. SanDisk's new Extreme III card delivers everything you want plus a whole lot more!

That's because only SanDisk Extreme III memory cards feature innovative ESP Technology for the fastest speeds and highest performance. ESP stands for "Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing". Simply put, it means you are getting the fastest read/write speeds available – an amazing minimum 20MB per second sequential read and write speed – speed you'll definitely appreciate whenever you find yourself shooting and storing pictures in harsh environments, extreme temperatures or at high altitudes.

Every SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card comes with RescuePRO so you can recover images, documents, mail, video, music – just about any digital file, with ease. Built with leading-edge media recovery algorithms, RescuePro lets you preview recoverable data before you try to retrieve it. With RescuePRO's unique recovery algorithm for MPEG audio and MPEG video recovery (MPEG-1/2/3) what you see, and what you hear, is what you can recover.

Rely on SanDisk Extreme III cards when speed is critical to getting the right shot.

Customer Reviews

Make sure you get the 2008 version of this card!!!
SanDisk has pulled a fast one on us who are accustomed to the Extreme III & IV series. They've updated the Extreme III series with a new "2008" spec model. Yeah, so what... Well, the 2008 spec Extreme III 16GB CF card is almost twice as fast as the original "20x" Extreme III 16GB CF card in my Nikon D3. In fact, the 2008 16GB model is just marginally slower than my Extreme IV 8GB card in my D3. This speed increase makes a big difference for me when shooting motorsports in RAW mode and hyperactive children. Even crazier still, as of this review, Amazon is selling the 2008 spec Extreme III 16GB card for ~$15 less than this much slower model.

Do yourself a favor before buying one of these cards and see how it will perform in your camera first... google for "Rob Galbraith CF performance database" and look up your camera. Buy intelligently!

Works great in the new Nikon D300
I just purchased the Nikon D300, and found that my "old" 4 GB SanDisk Ultra III CF card wasn't gonna cut it in this beast. Low and behold - the 16 GB is now shipping. The price was great, it arrived a day early, and I couldn't be happier. The Nikon formatted it without any issues at all. Here are the number of images the D300 (12.3 MP) can write to this card:

RAW - 606
TIFF - 423
Fine (JPG) - 1400
Normal (JPG) - 2900
Basic (JPG) - 5800

RAW + Fine - 430
RAW + Normal - 503
RAW + Basic - 549

Read/Write performance is excellent, and I look forward to not swapping cards out anymore. The two were made for each other.

This will work in a Canon 20/30/5D
You can't format the card in the camera. The camera in theory only supports 8gb cards, but it will recognize the 16gb card. HOWEVER, it will format the 16gb card as 8gb.

If you use a card reader attached to a computer to format the card, it will remain at 16gb and the camera will continue to see it as 16gb.

Word of caution... for most situations, multiple smaller cards are better. It's great you can get 1000s of images on a single card, but what happens if the card fails? Even high quality cards fail. 16gb cards are great for high-end uses, but for normal shooting (particularly if it's over several days) you really should use smaller cards.

I do time lapse photography, so I shoot several thousand frames over a few hours. The card works great for this. Would I use this to shoot a weeks worth of vacation photos? No way. Use smaller cards for that and offload them to the computer frequently.