Clearing up the GB CF card mystery

aleks 75 · 07-18-04, 04:34 PM

I am a pretty new member to this forum, and I've been reading a lot of stuff about CF Card capacities, and I see people writing and people arguing about how big CF cards are right now on the market.

Well, I was at a Trade show in September of 2003 and even back then I've seen on a Video Raid Server running 32 16GB Compact Flash Cards. This equipment was not for sale at that time but it existed and I've seen it working.

You can currently buy 14Gb 80X CF Cards from companies like Pretec. No those are not like IBM's mini Hard Drives in a Type II CF Card, it doesn't have any moving internal parts.

We use ourself an 8Gb and a bunch of 4Gb CF cards on our Nikon D100 and D70. The prices are rediculos at this moment and only make sense if you need it for business purpose and where you can justify the expense and actually make money back on it.

Hitachi made a broadcast quality Video camera for ENG use with 4 slots that can accomodate up to 32Gb CF cards per slot. (in DVCAM format you can store 1 hour of footage on 13.7 Gb).

I predict no tape anymore in the future, not even DVD's. I believe that you will rent movies in the future on CF cards. Just imagine that some movies come on one dual layer 9Gb DVD and most movies fit comfortably on single layered 4.7Gb DVDs. So We are not that far away from being in a completely Disk/Tape less enviroment. Disks are Non-Linear but can be scratched very easily (especially if you have kids) and Tapes are just not random accessible (even though they are much higher quality for Video playback).

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that please don't tell anybody that the biggest size CF chip is 4Gb. We've been past that for over a year go. In regards to SD Cards; we can buy in any electronic store 1Gb SD Cards for some pretty high $$$, however noone will carry in a retail store a 4Gb version of that because its well over $1000. But 4Gb SD Cards are already available and I wouldn't be surprised if there are 6, 8, 12 or higher GB cards in testing or at least under development and probably available in 2005. Besides miniSD Cards have already capacities of 512Mb and probably more.

aleks 75 · 07-18-04, 04:43 PM

2Gb SD Cards are available from about $400 bucks and up... at PCNation