Pretec SDHC 32GB 433x Media Card Review

In the world of digital media, one of the most abundant forms of media apart from USB flash drives, are SD cards. The vast majority of digital cameras these days use this card format and its variations in order to store photos and video in the masses. There are a few names out there that do shout out above the rest and consequently we see them used everywhere and people buy these brands without thinking about it, based on their reputation, known long term performance and reliability.

Pretec is one brand however that doesn’t necessarily come straight to mind when we think of memory cards, but in respect to the other players on the market, they are one of the original frontiers of Compact Flash and SD cards, offering their first SD cards way back in 1998.  Since then, the Taiwanese based company has built a large catalogue of over 200 patents and has shown that it has a strong R&D team by consistently rolling our faster and higher capacity cards. Their catalogue doesn’t consist solely of memory cards, with USB flash drives making up the other portion of their product lineup.

For any photographer or video camera user, having a high speed card that can take the punishment that todays latest DSLRs and HD video cameras can give is critical both in terms of performance, but also its reliability. The last thing any person wants to see is that their card has failed and all the media is lost – especially for the professionals.

The card we are taking a look at today is one of Pretec’s most recent offerings, and boasts to be the world’s 1st company (as of Computex 2011) to offer up a Class 16 433x SDHC/SHXC card with read speeds of over 65MB/s. Whilst this may sound great and it is a good starting ground, how will the card stand up to our testing process where we test the card with its read and write speeds but also but continuously punishing the card to see if there are any flaws that crop up – that’s what we are here to find out.