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.

(Roger: I think you're actually addressing Jeff, eh? <g> )

Well, yes, sorry. Everyone looks the same on the web....

I use several different recovery programs with mixed results, but Photorescue and Image Rescue seem to offer the best results. Students do all kinds of things to their cards (all the things you mentioned and more) but the most common response is, "they just disappeared." I don't know if they don't want to admit to causing the error or if indeed the card just hiccuped and wiped the images off.

Do you suggest that they reformat their cards after each use? I'm especially curious since this problem comes up with some frequency with people I know with differing cameras and cards.

I've always done that (kinda like formatting floppy disks before using them - and I'm old enough to recall that was the accepted way of minimizing floppy disk failures).

Since the CF cards use FAT or some variant thereof, they're vulnerable to index corruption. Formatting tends to fix that and the card should work fine (the next time) as opposed to having the card routinely fail.

The other "usual suspect" with these problems according to various threads on various boards is the USB card reader and flaky USB cables.

Of course, UMMV.....

I recommend formatting the card after each use and to not format in the computer. The vast majority of the incidents happen while the card is in camera. I would also say the majority of the failures happen during the review of images, rather than in the camera mode.

Just ordered the Sandisk Ultra II 512, got the 28 - 135 IS a month ago, tax time should be the 20d. I hope this CF serves me well as I am stretching to get this camera and I am having to do it in pieces :)

Would someone splain to me what the "secure" feature is on cards and cameras.
Thanks

Flash devices do have a limited number of read/write cycles, but they're in the 10,000 to 100,000 range. I would suspect that the card contacts would fail well before that. The # of insertions depends on the quality of the connectors of the cards and those on the camera. The CF housing offers little protection from static shock and dirt on the contacts, so be sure to handle the cards with care even though they are solid state.

As for the limited # of write cycles, I'm hoping that camera manufacturers wise up and allow you to stick the file table in a random section. I bet that this is the part of the device that fails because the CF device is accessing the same parts of the file system for images written all over the card. So, I would even go so far as to say that you can make your CF card last longer by allowing it to fill up. This almost sounds like advice for rechargeable batteries. Chuckle.

I thought that was changed, but maybe I'm remembering that wrong.

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Donald : The vast majority of the incidents happen while the card is in camera. I would also say the majority of the failures happen during the review of images, rather than in the camera mode. -->>>

That's rather interesting - not sure what to make of it. Sounds like corruption or timing issues in the camera -> CF circuitry. Maybe my good luck comes from not viewing the images in the camera (because I can't seem to see the tiny little 1.8" screen with my 50'ish eyes).

Guess something good comes from getting older....

<<<-- Originally posted by Gints Klimanis : Flash devices do have a limited number of read/write cycles, but they're in the 10,000 to 100,000 range. I would suspect that the card contacts would fail well before that. -->>>

Actually, it's 100,000 to 1,000,000 according to Rob Gailbreth's excellent site on Compact Flash cards (http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007)

Which is a couple of years of doing 100 read/writes per day. And as he points out, the card doesn't fail, just accumulates bad sectors which the operating system of the camera should work around.

I agree with the contacts being a likely choke point - they're not designed all that robustly. Although in fairness, I haven't had even my older cards act loose or electrically flaky.

And I thought a 512 MB SD card was big. Now they go up to 2.0 GB for such a little card. Incredible

It is thought the SD will become the standard over the next few years. CF has a fairly low maximum theoretical limit as to total capacity and R/W speed as compared to the limits for SD cards.

Ah, but CF is here, big and CHEAP! Also, most current digital cameras don't write fast enough to take advantage of even the new generation CV cards.

My big problem with the SD cards is that they're too small. I can barely keep track of the CF's.

I would like to see my next digital camera (the mythical Nikon "D200") come out with a removable media widget - plug an adapter in and use CF, SD or whatever neat format that rolls down the pike. It's certainly possible to do - my laptop has little slots for everything. My old Olympus E10 had both slots for a CF card and some other format that I can't remember the name of. Didn't take up too much space.

At least Sony finally started making cams that support both their proprietary Memory Stick and good ol' Compact Flash (DSC-F828 aka Purple Fringer).

Of course anything is better than the old Mavicas that used 1.44mb floppies for storage. Panasonic tried to up the ante with a cam that supported LS-120 discs but by then it was too late for the magnetic media (see also Zip 100MB/250MB).

Roger, I don't know that consumers are going to have a lot to say about it. There are numerous factors in favor of SD cards. Among the more notable are faster read/write times, lower power consumption, longer life expectancy, and smaller size.