The difference is the speed at which they can be read and written from/to.
The faster cards are the most expensive. Those who do 'machine gun'
photogrpahy generally benefit most from the faster cards. General and or
studio based photography is a bit overkill.

Try Rob Galbraiths website for the geeky stuff! ;-)
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

hth

www.google.com: lexar sandisk review (and the innumerable variations)

www.robgalbraith.com

How many more reviews do you need?

Modern social science has shown that:

a) people who buy Lexar equipment are impotent limp-wristed wimpies,
b) people who buy Sandisk are virile, god-like hunks of masculinity.

at probability p=0.001 of being wrong, under assumptions of normality
etc.  Who are you to question the F-test?

Sandisk Ultra II, Extreme III are the best cards

Vinnie

I plan to purchase a D70s in about a month or so. I understand that I
will need to purchase memory cards since they don't come with the
camera. Two questions:

1. There are two competing brands - Lexar and Sandisk. What are the
pros and cons of each (other than price)?

2. Lexar has a 4X; 40X; and 80X cards. Sandisk has Std; Ultra II; and
Extreme III cards. What is the difference between the cards within
each brand?

Opinions and insights will be welcomed.

Thanks,
Alan

If you don't need the speed of even a base CF card, the microdrives are IMO
much better value.  I think that the number of times in the last 5 years
I've wanted to shoot over 1 frame/second is 2 so I bought a 2 GB microdrive
and I'm absolutely happy with the capacity compared to flash-memory based
cards.  Of course I did buy a 512MB CF card as a backup, spar and utility
since the software upgrades that Nikon publishes that you can do yourself
must use the CF card, not the microdrive (at least according to Nikon and
NO! I'm not going to try it to find out if it's true.)

Norm

They're both good brands.  I personally buy Sandisk, but I know
someone who buys almost exclusively Lexar and has no problems.

There is a great difference in speed between the 4X and 40X, or the
Standard and Ultra II, in terms of how quickly images are written to
flash, or can be read off later by computer.  There is a noticeable,
but not great, difference in speed between the 40X and the 80X, which
is about the same speed as the Sandisk Ultra and Extreme cards.  In
theory (and in specialized laboratory test), there is another visible
jump in speed from the Ultra II to Extreme III, but in practice (in
real cameras), the difference is too small to even notice.  Buy Lexar
80X or Sandisk Ultra II.

If you want to see speed tests done with different cameras (different
cameras having different performance profiles with different chips),
try:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

    Well ... the Lexars recently had two different problems with
certain Cannon cameras which required both a fix in the camera's
firmware and a replacement of the Lexar card.

    This latter part applied only to certain batch numbers of the
Lexar cards.

    However, with a Nikon D70s, I doubt that it matters.  I have a
D70, and two 1GB 80X Lexar cards, and have had no problems with them.

    The selection between Lexar and Sandisk was made on the basis of
availability at the time of purchase (I got the Lexar 1GB 80X cards,
FWIW), but I have had no reason to regret it.

    The faster ones only make a significant difference under two
circumstances.

1)    When you are taking batch mode photos, the camera shoots at a
    certain number of frames per second, until the camera's buffer
    memory is full, and then it slows down to the rate at which the
    camera can transfer imagest to the CF card.  If this is
    important to you, you will want one of the faster cards offered
    by whichever maker you select.

2)    When you are transferring images from the card to the computer
    for processing, you will need to wait a time proportional to the
    percentage of full the card is, the size of the card, and the
    speed of the card -- assuming that your interface to the
    computer is fast enough.  If it is a USB 1.x speed, the card's
    speed won't make much difference.  If it is USB 2.0, however,
    or if you are using a PCMCIA adaptor, the speed of the card will
    make a significant difference.  If you just start it downloading
    the images, and then go read something while it is downloading,
    no problem.  However, if you are waiting for the download to
    finish so you can dig into processing (or at least examining)
    the images, you can get to what you want to do much more quickly
    if you have a faster card.

    You have my opinions above.

    Enjoy,
        DoN.