25 out of 26 people found this review helpful.
The best Flash Media available
Date of Review: Dec 10, 2000
Compact Flash is one of several types of media that are used in digital cameras. Smart Media and Sony?s Memory Stick are the two other major competitors to Compact Flash. In my opinion, Compact Flash is the best media format out there at the current time. That doesn?t mean that he others are bad, or don?t do the job well. I don?t think that is true at all, I a big fan of Smart Media, I?ve written a review here at Epinions. Any of these media formats work well, and they are not bad choices. But after using Compact Flash for a while, I have come to really like it more than Smart Media.
What is Compact Flash?
Compact Flash is a type of storage media. Whatever you store on a Compact Flash card will retain whatever is on there, even when removed from the camera. You take pictures that are recorded on the CF card. You can take it out of the camera and all the pictures that were taken will remain on the card until you remove them. It is like a small disk drive that has zero moving parts so it is very durable, very dependable.
A CF card is approximately 1.5 x 1 x 1/8 inches. As I said, very small. They are not quite as small as a Smart Media card, which is about as thick as a credit card. But the slight increase in size makes a CF card feel much more durable. A Smart Media card can be folded or bent. It is flexible. CF is sturdier. The slight trade-off in size is more than offset by the benefits, in my opinion.
I have read about stress tests on Compact Flash, where people have put their CF cards in the washing machine. They have come out of the wash and still worked. That says it all.
Sizes
CF card come in many, many different storage sizes. 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, 256 Megs are all available and larger sizes are constantly coming out. CF has the controller built right into the card itself. This means that if someone comes out with a new sized card, your camera will automatically be able to use it. In a Smart Media card, the controller is on the camera. When a new size card comes out, your camera may not be able to use it since the controller may not be compatible with the size card.
Compact Flash II
Within the CF world, there are two sizes. I and II. Predictably, the II is larger (slightly). Many people will not need to use a type II card. Type I cards come in all the large sizes, 128 Meg, etc. But one thing to keep in mind when looking at CF cards and cameras is that IBM makes a type II CF card that is actually a mini hard drive. These drives come in 170, 340, 500 Meg, and 1 Gig sizes. If your camera can accept type II, you have the option of adding a 1-gigabyte hard drive for storage. That is like 15-64 Meg cards. With the constantly increasing number of pixels and file sizes, these options for large scale storage may be important to you.
Conclusion
I have become a big fan of Compact Flash as a storage medium. It is durable and is flexible enough to grow in the future. It is a forward-looking technology. Cameras will increase in the number of mega pixels that each picture can contain. As the number of pixels increase, the size of files will increase. A technology like CF, that has shown it can keep up with these jumps in file size while retaining compatibility with older cameras is the right one for today?s (and tomorrow?s) digital cameras. Other technologies work, and work well, but CF has a nice combination of features and dependability that is hard to beat.
