If you’ve been in the market for a new memory card or two for your digital camera, you might want to know that SanDisk – the people who created the Compact Flash – have been working to create a new line of CF cards designed to hold up to the heaviest of testing that a photographer can put them through.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro takes the SanDisk Extreme line-up and boost it even more than what it was in the first place. It features new error correction codes for better performance, new processing architecture, weather resistance including new silicon and a whole bunch of things that SanDisk’s PR team have loaded into the press release which you can see by clicking this bit right here.

However what you might want to know about before you go and do the whole “press release” thing is some of the features that took our attention when we got to play with it… which we still are.

Rather than just rating the card at 120x or 133x and being done with it, this card now uses UDMA 6 to achieve 90 MB/s, provided your camera can of course support it.

SanDisk showed this to us by testing it on the Canon 5D Mk II. With an older SanDisk 15 MB/s card, it took 37 seconds for 15 shots, while the newer Extreme Pro’s 90 MB/s speed brought that time down to 11 seconds.

Here at Chimp, we’ve currently got the Nikon D300 (recently superseded by the D300s, which we’ll be reviewing soon) which gave us similar timings. For this test, we tried both a 15 frame burst and a 27 shot burst on the SanDisk Exteme Pro 16GB and the SanDisk Extreme III card (which handles 30 MB/s). The 27 shot burst is slightly different as it was a burst of 15 shots fired plus letting the camera handle a 2-3 extra shots on top of it.

Our  timings for the 15 frame continuous burst worked like this:

• SanDisk Extreme III (30 MB/s): 19.7 seconds
• SanDisk Extreme Pro (90 MB/s): 7.7 seconds

Keep in mind that these timings also include the saving of information to the card, something we can monitor by the little green light on the back of our cameras (or orange if you use a Canon).

For the 27 frame burst, we got:

• SanDisk Extreme III (30 MB/s): 34.7 seconds
• SanDisk Extreme Pro (90 MB/s): 14 seconds

If that doesn’t say speed, I don’t know what does.

Now if you’re anything other than a pro, you might want to turn away once you see the price of these new cards.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro cards come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB and range in price from $399 for the 16GB to $1299 for the 64GB.

There is an upside, however, as the new SanDisk Extreme cards are faster too, and if you’re not a professional their pricing is more than doable. The SanDisk Extreme cards (yes, the naming scheme is as confusing as you think it is) are rated for 60 MB/s and come in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB varieties. The 32GB version has an RRP of $349.