The all new Lexar Professional 1066X 64GB CompactFlash series is rather extraordinary, and even the most jaded of professionals will be impressed with what this new generation has to offer. This is because Lexar have finally harnessed the true potential of the UDMA 7 standard. More importantly Lexar not only focused in on read performance but they also drastically improved write performance of the new 1066X. This improved read and write performance will get your attention and will make justifying the asking price of the 64GB capacity model down right easy.
On the read side of the equation this card can, will, and does routinely deliver on its promise of blazing fast, 160MB/s speeds. With that being said, unless you own an empty Seagate 6TB hard drive the only way you will be able to keep up with this little powerhouse is if you have a Solid State Drive to dump your images to. Anything less and your system will bottleneck performance long before the Lexar 1066X does. That is how fast this new series is. This improvement alone turns the usual chore of emptying a full CF card much, much more tolerable. In fact this card will reduce transfer times by about one third. That is a big enough improvement to give you (or your assistant) the luxury of using fewer cards in a shoot – as you won’t be left with only full cards.
On the write side, phrases such as ‘night and day’ do spring to mind when comparing the 1066X Professional to the 800X Professional series – as they are simply in different leagues from one another. This is because the 1066X offers over three times the guaranteed minimum write performance of the 800X series (VPG-65 vs VPG-20). To us this rating is actually more impressive than the ‘up to’ rating comparison of 155 vs 75 MB/s, as the new VPG-65 rating means your real world shot buffer capacity will be larger than ever before.
Combining blazing fast read & write performance with a price that is noticeably less than other tier-1 manufactures offerings is obviously a winning combination; but when you then mix in a lifetime warranty and actually useful free software we foresee the Lexar Professional 1066X series quickly finding their way into many camera bags. No matter if you are a seasoned professional or simply want to use the kind of gear the pros do, the Lexar Professional 1066X deserves to be on your short list. Even if you don’t think you will ever take full advantage of the performance it offers, you should still think long and hard about it as the Lexar 1066X Professional compact flash card series is simply one of the best performing and best value UDMA7 CF cards you will ever find.
