This Lexar 2 GB 133xw SD card is part of the manufacturer’s professional range.  It has been designed with professional photographers in mind, and sells itself as being perfect for capturing shots in burst mode or for long videos.  We were expecting excellent transfer rates for both reading and writing when it arrived in our labs.  One nice surprise is that two pieces of software are supplied free.  The first is Paint Shop Pro X, an image manipulation package.  The other, Image Rescue 3, is designed to restore photos and videos accidentally deleted or on damaged memory cards.

Record speeds

In terms of speed, we were truly impressed by this card.  It achieved results that were slightly better than the Sandisk Extreme III Class 6, our previous winner.  In writing ‘medium files’ (a photo of around 4 MB), this model reached speeds of 12.8 MB/s, compared to Sandisk’s 12.6 MB/s.  The whole 2GB can, therefore, be filled in 2 minutes and 40 seconds.  As for reading from the card, Lexar does equally well there with 17.7 MB/s for the same test, where Sandisk only scored 17 MB/s.  Downloading the entire contents of the card should only take 1 minute and 55 seconds.