Compact Flash Digital Film

Digital Film

One of the obvious advantages of shooting with a digital camera is the huge savings on the boxes upon boxes of film we all used to have to buy. I really do think of these compact flash

flash cards as the film for my camera instead of simply memory cards, as I think it mentally gets me ready to treat them with more care. While they may be much more sturdy they are not indestructible. Flash memory does have a finite number of times it can be written to and deleted, but this is really only a concern when using them in laptops for instance as the number is into the hundreds of thousands generally and not many photographers get to keep his/her cards long enough to use them that much.

For years I stuck to two companies, SanDisk and Lexar as they always produced cards that were at the cutting edge with speed improvements and reliability. Most of the 26 cards I have are still from one of those two companies, but I’ve since added a few cards from a company called MyMemory as they are very reasonably priced, fast enough for most applications

and I’ve yet to have one give me any problems. The truth of the matter is, while there may be almost countless companies selling the digital film at retail, they are actually produced by only a handful. I will add here that I’m happy that Nikon has kept to using compact flash digital memory for the top of their dSLR range instead of moving to SD as its remains a little cheaper, but more so because its easier to handle, feels more sturdy and so far has remained a generation ahead as far as capacity goes - although in this case they both get updated every few months. In addition, I have so many of the cards I’d hate to have to start buying loads of new ones to replace perfectly functional cards, even though the price has dropped to the point of it being not such a big concern now.

For most users, the speed that is far more important is the read speed. All dSLR cameras have a buffer in them which enables the camera to store a certain number of files and they are written to the memory card in the background which allows you to go on and keep shooting. We have now reached the point that the camera bodies have a large enough buffer as to render the write speed irrelevant for most users. The exception to this is obviously sports and perhaps people that machine gun it when shooting animals/birds in flight. They may very well run out of buffer space so the speed the camera can write those files from the buffer to the memory card is going to make a huge difference.

For somebody who shoots weddings primarily, its rare I’m even in the high speed shooting mode, and even when I am its only going to be used sparingly. The speed rating which does effect me is the read speed, which works out rather nicely as the cards are more often faster at reading than writing. When I get back to my workstation and have 1000 images to upload to the computer, the difference between a 20X card and a 133X or the new UDMA 300X cards can be huge. It will save half an hour or more of upload time sometimes with the faster cards. An important note if you are interested in the newer, more expensive and blindingly fast UDMA 300X cards. In order to achieve the speed advantage, you will need a UDMA compact flash reader, there are several about from SanDisk, Lexar & Delkin. I use a FW800 reader from Lexar which I like very much, but just remember you need both products to get the advantage.

Stick to a company that you’ve heard of that are leaders in the field such as SanDisk and Lexar. Kingston also are a very well respected company, but I have to admit that I’ve only had two cards ever fail on me and both happened to be Kingston which has put me off personally, but there are many people using their products daily without any problems, so I’m sure I just happened to be unlucky. There are some good smaller companies too, and if you find one you like try their products out on less important shots first until you have confidence, but I really liked the My Memory cards a great deal as they did their job well and for very little money. Unfortunately, as of writing this they don’t offer any UDMA cards and I have started using my three UDMA cards more often now, but its only because I upload so many files so often, if you are only shooting 50 images for instance the time saved uploading the images will only be a minute or two so the previous speed kings of 133X may be a wise choice to save the expensive of the cards and a new reader.