Where’s the peanut butter?!

Tanya just got a href="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Canon/canon_sd300.asp">fancy
new camera and its media format is SD. I’ve bought SD, MMC and CF
memory before but not really paid close attention to the performance
of the various types of cards so I just did a little research and have
learned:

• Speed really matters I had a vague sense of this before but
  it turns out that most SD memory will write at about 2Mbps. A 5
  megapixel camera produces pictures in the neighborhood of 1-2MB in
  size so creates a pretty clear potential that, depending on
  whether/how your camera buffers data, you’ll miss shots because you’re
  waiting for the write from your last shot to complete (it’s not
  immediately obvious to me where the 2Mbps number comes from or whether
  it’s megabits/megabytes - but the potential is there).
• There is no real clarity over SD performance Typical SD
  cards evidently yield about 2Mbps, high-speed or ultra high-speed may
  yield 8-10Mbsp. Costco currently has some Lexar non-high/ultra-high
  performance SD cards at 20% off that are supposed to write
  4.8MBps

This reminds me of USB2 where a device claiming to be USB2 may be
full-speed USB2 (12MBps) or high-speed USB2 (the full 480MBps) and if
you’re not a careful customer, you’ll get the USB2 that’s only 10x
faster than USB1 instead of the one that’s 400x faster, except it’s
even worse since you can’t just check the product specs and get any
meaningful information. Company X’s high-speed SD card is probably
faster than their standard line, but how fast is it in absolute terms?
Relative terms compared to their other product lines? Relative terms
compared to Company Y’s product line? Many consumers may not be able
to understand this information but when you *do* want to figure it out
and you can’t, and that’s no good.