It’s beginning. The compact Flash card has been usurped by SD. In digital photography circles, this is a big issue. CF has been the king of memory cards for ever, and many of us have substantial investments in these little chips. Yes, SD has a greater market share among consumer-level products, but they have always been behind in professional applications. Memory capacity and speed have always been paramount in digital photography, where the dominance lies. For the more technical among you, I’m referring to SDHC (MMC) cards, vs. Type 1 CF, not microdrives. Today I received my new “Porter’s” catalog, and, low and behold, there was a 8GB SD card for sale. All the CF cards are maxed-out at 4 GB. Oh hell no.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t some solid state 12mb chip on the back shelf of San-disk corp out there. It just means that the market, which has been pretty predictable in it’s progression over the years, has finally turned. For a long time CF was always just ahead of SD. SD not only caught-up, but flew ahead of CF. I’m not too worried; it will still be some years before CF is phazed-out. This is a shame. If half the technical innovations applied to SD cards over the years had made their way to CF, Type 1 CF would still be lightyears ahead. There’s SATA CF and other architecture innovations that never made it to market. Shame. CF still leads in speed, and that is extremely important when you’re getting 12Mp shots at 3 fps. But, this is the writing on the wall. Pro-level equipment should soon start more offering SD-only models. What ever will I do with all these CF cards? Well, I still have a CF MP3 player in the desk. Somewhere.
February 27, 2008 at 8:41 pm
hua?? i just got a 32 GIG card on ebay $199 SD will NEVER match CF
it it all about volume of the card check ebay there all over the place…
PS my computers reader wont read over 8 gig but thats ok for now
http://cgi.ebay.com/ADATA-32GB-COMPACT-FLASH-CARD-32-GB-CF-SPEEDY-CF-32-Go_W0QQitemZ350030501183QQihZ022QQcategoryZ122612QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
look it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
February 27, 2008 at 8:46 pm
SD is my #2 choise for mem
the rest like XD memstick
micro and mini SD are the biggest joke .as xd is the same size as
micro and mini SD
NO MORE DAM CARDS PLEASE!!!!!!
February 28, 2008 at 12:27 am
I know. Tiger’s got that one new for $150. Sorry dude. Samsung 40nm Arch allows up to 64GB in CF. My point was that these larger cards were usually the first ones we’d see in advertisements and catalogs. Their supposed to NEW and HOT. Now we have to hunt for the larger cards. That’s not right. But, it’s what happens when a product goes from being an industry standard to, well, a niche (then to nothing).
I’m not saying CF is dead yet. We’ll see larger and larger cards for some time. Maybe even a few jumps in technology. But, I fear a sign-post has been passed. We’ll be searching harder and harder for shrinking quantities of these super-capacity cards in years to come. Until one day, some pimple-faced geek at Best Buy says to me.. “CF-What?”
I’ll just pile my all CF cards in the box in the back of the garage with my 2.88M floppy drive and SCSI CD-ROM.
February 28, 2008 at 12:52 am
the same thing happend with DVD-RAM
funney thing is all the new PC’s
have DVD-RAM support…
i love those carteges, no more scrached discs
funney
“”"”Until one day, some pimple-faced geek at Best Buy says to me.. “CF-What?””"”"”
HI HI !!!
the cool thing about CF
is it is IDE bus and PCcard bus
natve
so in my panasonic CF-72(no pun!)laptop i put linux on a 32GIG card with a adapter in the HD bay and Vollaa!
cheap SSHD !!! very fast and more battery life !!!!!