8GB Compact Flash Card unveiled
 

SanDisk just announced a 8GB CF card, 4GB MS Pro, and a 2GB SD in their Ultra II lineup.

... and there was much rejoicing!

Click here to read the SanDisk press release

Sounds like a good companion for the 20D (except for the price).

thanks for the update, Tommy. Did your read the press release? their is a quote from a camera shop owner that states that he sells a lot of these high performance cards to Digital REbel and D70 owners. Yah right. "I take the $999 camera and $959 8MB card," says the Rebel owner.

CF prices are dropping very fast. Beware over over priced CF cards from many discounters.

The 8Gb CF card will be very welcomed by the those looking toward the 1Ds Mark II.

Or the new Mamiya. I assume it uses CF cards.

Gee that's starting to get in to the range of miniDv tape.

Good point. A dual CF card slot and two 8GB CF cards and you have more storage than a MiniDV tape.

Now if I only had dual layer DVDs...

Well not only is the total capacity approaching miniDV tape but the R/W times are exceeding the requirements for SD and possibly HD.

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Donald : Or the new Mamiya. I assume it uses CF cards.

Gee that's starting to get in to the range of miniDv tape. -->>>

With a 22mp digital back on that ZD, Focus Enhancements might be looking at a new future market for their Firestores.

Its funny, we will probably think of a terrabyte card as no big thing in a few years.

In the near future Mini dv (and other tape formats) will almost definitely go the way of the dodo, as solid state formats increase in size at an exponential rate.

>their is a quote from a camera shop owner that states that he >sells a lot of these high performance cards to Digital REbel and >D70 owners. Yah right. "I take the $999 camera and $959 8MB >card," says the Rebel owner.

The owner was talking about SanDisk Ultra II, but not necessarily the new cards. I have a D70 and an Ultra II 2 GByte card, which cost a bit under $400 in June, 2004. While the D70 flash interface tops out at about 5 MBytes/sec, higher performance is totally worth it when transferring the pictures using a USB2 card reader.

>In the near future Mini dv (and other tape formats) will almost >definitely go the way of the dodo, as solid state formats >increase in size at an exponential rate.

We would still need an archival medium, but that currently seems to be hard drives and DVDs. I would really welcome the dual slot CF card interface another fellow mentioned. It would be cool to
do video with higher frame rates, higher pixel counts and less compression. I would totally pay for a device that didn't limit the video dynamic range to 8 bits, such as on miniDV. Also, I'd like an instant start/stop record so I don't lose so much action footage waiting for the tape to start up.

It would be nice to get rid of drums and transport mechanisms that fail a lot. That would make a camera last a long time without maintenance.

As the price drops on CF cards the reliability seems to be dropping too. Maybe it's just that more people are using the medium, but I have several students per week that have card issues and need me to recover images with the recovery software I have.

Really? Do these failures seem to happen most frequently on higher (i.e. 1-2Gb) or lower capacity cards, Jeff?

I would say 512MB cards and up are the ones having the issues. However, I rarely see 256MB and smaller cards, except in older cameras. I would say 512MB has become the standard. I have a 512MB on my desk now from a faculty members trip last week to France. He swears all he was doing was reviewing the images, in a bar mind you, and the screen flashed error and showed an empty card. He had the presence of mind to set that card aside and not record on it. I was able to only recover about half of the files (230 images). He swears the card was full but the recovery software only worked on half the files. Odd, or it could have been the wine effecting his memory, not the cards.

CF problems
 

Ken:

What sort of problems are you seeing? I have 5 CF cards ranging from 256 to 1GB from several manufacturers and used in several cameras. Absolutely no problems with any of them (knock on hard surface).

Are you using something like Photo rescue to recover them? Do the cards act like they need to be formatted? (Lost files, incomplete files).

Do your students use safe CF practices? (No static, no runs through the laundry, format in camera before each use?

Inquiring minds want to know.