Thank you VERY much for the responses, they are greatly appreciated! I went into my B&H cart to buy the Mark II (I put it in there yesterday) and now it's saying it's backordered again. Hopefully they'll have another batch in the next couple of days. Thanks again.

I use both a 16GB and 32GB Kingston Elite Pro 133x compact flash cards ($35 and $70) , and they work great with the 5D Mark II.

I bought three 16gb Transcend cards. One failed on a job, first time I used it. Half the files were corrupt.

Since then I swtiched to Sandisk Extreme III and have had no problems.

Has anybody used the Hoodman RAW CF cards? (UDMA RAW CompactFlash-Hoodman Corporation)

Spec-wise, they look nice.

As well as their Firewire 800/400 reader (RAW FireWire 800/400 CF Reader-Hoodman Corporation)

If shooting video is important to you and you don't want your camera to freeze and loose an 8 minute shot, I would highly avoid the SanDisk Extreme III 8GB CF cards. They have been reported to freeze the camera. Read this thread for more detail 5D Mark II Freezes / Locks up / Buffer Problem SOLVED and http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-eos...-compared.html and DVXuser.com -- The online community for filmmaking - View Single Post - Interview Shots from a Corporate Project.

I have now shot over 700GB of video with three cameras using the Kingston Elite Pro 133x 32GB CF cards and have not had one freeze or lock-up. We are shooting 14 minute takes each time. I would never trust the SanDisk Extreme III 8GB cards for this.

The SanDisk Ultra II 4GB card never experienced a lock up by the way. Only Extreme III 8GB.

Good luck!

Just wondering if anybody has tried using the Transcend Industrial CompactFlash Cards, they are meant to have a wider temperature operating range. I have had no problems with the Transcend 133x and 300x but with high summer temperatures here I thought I may give the Industrial version a try. What do you think?

Bob

I bought 3 Extreme III 16g cards when I ordered my 5dmk2 on its announcement day. When the camera came all was well with the cards and camera. Just before a trip in January I tried some Qmemory (16gb) cards I was using with my 40d and older 5d in the new mk2. They worked fine, and the Sandisk 16gb worked fine also, until....... I formated the Qmemory in the MK2.

At that point the sandisk cards stopped working on the mk2. They worked on all the other 2 cameras and were formattable(?) under win XP and OS x. Canon had no explanation for the behavior. Sandisk, very helpful BTW, expressed me 3 new extreme III 16 gb cards. They didn't work on the mk2, but worked everywhere else. After the trip I sent the camera to canon for repair, as suggested by Canon Tech people. I included a sandisk card and a Qmemory card.

Canon said the inner mechanism was replaced and the sandisk cards now function as they should. I'm afraid to use the Qmemory again on the 5dmk2 for fear of losing the use of my 6 sandisk cards until I sent the camera out for repair again.

Does anyone else use Qmemory cards on their 5dmk2?

Jim

Buck I also use the 32GB Transcend 133x cards and have had no problem. You don't need fast cards for video, although obviously the faster the card, the faster download speeds to your computer, and the faster you can shoot RAW stills rapid fire.

So, I have 16GB Extreme IV UDMA cards for my rapid RAW shooting, and I use 32GB Transcend 133x cards for video recording.

I've got one Extreme III 8Gb and 6 Ultra II 4Gb - never had any problems with any of them, shot nearly 300Gb so far (mostly on the Extreme III).

I have two Transcend 133X 16GB cards... They're great. Haven't had a problem yet.

I've used SanDisk Ultra II 4GB cards from Costco for years with a 5D and now the Mark II. I've never had a problem with still capture or now video. While less convenient, it's nice that if I do lose a card (more likely that I physically lose it as almost happened on a recent shoot), I'm not missing as much data. Transfer rates are fine. My opinion is some of the ultra high speed more expensive cards are overkill at least for my use.

CF Flash Decisions
 

What would be an ideal combo of CF cards and the 5DMKII for:

1. Shooting RAW + JPEG in bursts
2. Shooting Video + Still Capture
3. Shooting Video only

I guess I would probably just need the fastest cards out there?
I don't know how much #2 I will actually do but would like to have the ability.
I also don't plan to machine gun shoot, but I don't know what the 5DMKII is capable of with RAW + JPEG bursts?

I am also trying to spend as least as I can but yet get as much GB storage as I can.
I think I need one CF card for the photo scenarios and one CF card for the video scenarios.
Which ones should I consider for each? It sounds like the 133x cards are good for video only but not if I want to shoot RAW and RAW + JPEG burst as well as taking a still while shooting video?

Has anyone used or tried the Pretec cards?
http://www.ptiglobalusa.com/hisphicacfca.html

Tom from Timescapes.org pointed me towards these, says they are great!

You don't need super fast cards unless you're doing lots and lots of burst stills at full 3.9 fps

of course fast cards help with download as well as saving on camera...

video only really needs 20mps (I went with sandisk extreme iii with 30mps) just to be safe

So will a SanDisk Extreme III and/or IV card handle RAW+JPEG bursts, say if I was only doing 10-15 bursts at a time?

I know the III and IV will handle the video fine.

For bursts, I'd get the IV.

For video you need a bit over 40 mega bits per second. Most cards do closer to 20 mega bytes per second. That's four times faster than you need.

You might consider a 4GB SanDisk IV, and a 32GB slower card. You can also use the slower card for timelapse shooting of stills.