Yet Another “World's Fastest” 16GB UDMA CompactFlash Card Hits the Shelves

Although 16 GB UDMA CompactFlash cards are not exactly growing on trees, it seems that they're becoming increasingly popular among semi-pro and professional photographer, due to their high access speeds, large capacities and, more importantly, to the emergence of digital cameras that can actually take advantage of these features (Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D300 and Nikon D3).
And the latest announcement regarding such a product comes from Delkin, who has just released the Compact Flash PRO 305x 16 GB, which provides both very large data transfer speeds, as well as a storage capacity to match.

As the name says it, the memory card can reach very high access speeds of 305X (which translates into a theoretical transfer rate of 45MB/sec). This is partly due to the fact that the CF card uses high grade SLC NAND flash modules, which allows for the aforementioned large data transfer rates. However, this 305X speed is not as impressive as you might think, since 300X speeds are already becoming standard.

However, it seems that Delkin's new offering also targets those (rather unfortunate, but quite many) photographers without UDMA enabled digital cameras and camera backs. Thus, the card-to-computer transfer times are touted to be very low, especially when the card is used (why am I not surprised) with the company's UDMA enabled FireWire reader and adapters.

"Delkin confirms its commitment to continuing leadership in speed, capacity and reliability of memory cards with this new expansion to our PRO memory card line," said Eric Richter, Delkin's Marketing Manager. "What's more, Delkin's complete UDMA solution for professional photographers is unmatched by any other manufacturer. Besides our CompactFlash PRO cards, we offer UDMA enabled ExpressCard and CardBus adapters, and a FireWire reader for the fastest download speeds to the computer. That's critical for such working pros as news, sports, and wedding photographers, but any photographer working with larger RAW files will benefit."

The Delkin Compact Flash PRO 305x 16 GB card has a MSRP of around 400 US dollars, which is comparable to the other similar offerings coming from SanDisk, for example.

Windows Vista SP1 Release Candidate Is Here – It Goes Public Next Week

The first Release Candidate of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is here, and Microsoft will make available a public build of the development milestone the coming week. On December 5, the Redmond company dropped Vista SP1 RC via Microsoft Connect, opening up the build to MSDN and TechNet subscribers today, on December 6. In addition to these locations, Vista SP1 RC will hit the Microsoft Download Center in just a few days, come December 10. Nick White, Microsoft Product Manager working
with the Vista launch team, has revealed that by this stage of development Vista SP1 can be considered as close to finish as possible. White indicated that the next move for Microsoft would be to release Vista SP1 to manufacturing, and stressed increased levels of performance and stability for the service pack.

"The size of the standalone installers have decreased significantly. For example, the standalone installer packages consisting of all 36 languages (x86 and x64 chip architectures) are smaller by over 50%. The standalone installer packages consisting of just the 5 languages (again, x86 and x64) slated for initial release are more than 30% smaller in size. The required amount of disc space for SP1 installation has also decreased significantly. Furthermore, with the RC, if more space is required to install SP1, an error message will now display exactly how much space is needed to complete the installation. Previous SP1 versions left behind a directory of files that wasn't needed after installation and occupied about 1GB of space; the RC includes automatic disk clean-up to remove this directory", White enumerated some of the modifications delivered by RC1 in comparison to the Beta builds of Vista SP1.

But, most of all the Redmond company has focused on improving the installation experience with Vista SP1 RC. White noted a boost in reliability, as well as the addition of extra guidance from Windows Update. Now, users can benefit from a succession of screens displayed during the installation process of Vista SP1 RC. At this point in time, it is clear that Microsoft will open up the Release Candidate for Vista SP1 quite soon. But at the same time, going public with Vista SP1 RC means that the service pack is as close to finalization as possible. This could, in fact, be an indication that Vista SP1's release in the first quarter of 2008, might be close to January-February.