Fastest SD card for photogs as of Dec 2008?

[proaudioguy]

What is the fastest SD card memory available today for a reasonable price? I have a new camera, it's about 1 step below an SLR with 18x zoom, 10mp, etc. It recovers pretty quickly with the internal memory, but with the cheap 1GB cards I have it's much slower. My terminology may be wrong since I'm not a photog. I just want to be able to snap pictures as quickly as possible without waiting to write to the card.

I found a Panasonic card for $300 (32GB) which is way out of my price range.

[sparta.rising]

I have a Panasonic DMC-FZ18 which is in the same class of cameras. I don't notice any delay with my Sandisk 2GB SD card, but I know SDHC cards can have longer right times. My parents have an older Olympus in this SLR-like class and when I bought them a 2GB XD card, they had the write delay. If you put the camera in continuous-shot mode you can take photos without waiting for them to be written to the card. It will continue writing as you shoot, I'm guessing buffered in internal memory.

[ricerocket]

I've always used the Sandisk Extreme stuff on my DSLR, but I've only used Compactflash. I assume their SD stuff would be just as nice though.

[Radioguy]

As for classes of SD cards, Class 6 is the class to shop for. These cost more, and may be branded as a different line from a company. For instance, Sandisk has blue SD and SDHC cards, which are all Class 2 (slowest speed), then they have black and silver ones called "Ultra II" which are Class 4, and then black and red ones called "Extreme III" which are Class 6.

The class will usually be on the packaging and card. If you see none, and especially if it's cheap, then it's probably class 2.

The SDHC cards I see at retail go up to 32GB as well. Maybe 64GB too, but I haven't seen it yet.

[neenee]

Yup, Class 6 is the fastest available and even though I may not need such fast cards, I have two 4GB Class 6 Transcend SDHC cards for my Canon Powershot G9.