help with compact flash card choice please

happyhero

Hi My wife would like a new compact flash card (2GB we are going for) for her birthday for her Canon camera. Do I need to watch out for anything as there seems a large choice and prices seem to vary wildly. Don't want to go too mad with price but can you buy some that will make the camera respond quicker, ie when she goes to take a picture with the current chip there is an annoying delay which I think is the case with most digital cameras but if you buy a better chip can you minimise this or has the chip got nothing to do with this?

Also can you recommend a few best makes and tell me anything not to buy?

Are there different physical sizes, or does the fact that it is compact flash mean it is a certain size and all compact flash are the same physical size, so that I only need worry about how many GB we get?

Any help appreciated.

f1charlie

A good selection of Compact Flash cards here:

http://www.w2w.com/searchResults_x4.asp?searchtype=3&andor=0&tabSelect=TAB4&searchvalue=cfall&pageTitle=All%20-%20CompactFlash%20Cards

Physically all CF cards will be the same, so they will fit her camera. What you may have to watch out for is the maximum memory size (Gb) her camera can take.
Some cards are faster than others, but this only affects the time taken to write the data to the card, and so the delay before the camera is ready to take the next shot. You can reduce the delay in the actual picture capture by pre-focussing the camera i.e. depress the shutter button part way to allow the camera to focus first and then take the shot.

brazilianwax

I've just put a Sandisk Extreme III (4GB) card in my iPod. It is much much faster than the drive it replaced, and I'm thrilled with it.:j

Thinking about upgrading again to 8GB - prices on mymemory.co.uk are good.
You can get the 2GB of the Extreme III for less than £20 at the moment :beer:

I have a 2GB card in my camera and it holds a lot of pics.

It's a standard format, so you should be okay with whatever you buy.

General_Hogwart

I have used several Integral memory cards in the past and they have always been good. There is a 100x one here for £33 http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=536&prepg=1 which should be fast enough for you and hopefully avoid the delay.

CompactFlash (CF) was originally developed as a type of data storage device used in portable electronic devices. For storage, CompactFlash typically uses flash memory in a standardized enclosure. This form was first specified and produced by SanDisk in 1994. The physical format is now used for a variety of devices.

There are two main subdivisions of CF cards, Type I (3.3mm thick) and the thicker Type II (CF2) cards (5mm thick). The CF Type II slot is used by Microdrives and some other devices. There are four main speeds of cards including the original CF, CF High Speed (using CF+/CF2.0), a faster CF 3.0 standard and a yet faster CF 4.0 standard that is being adopted as of 2007. The thickness of the CF card type is dictated by the preceding PCMCIA card type standard.
CF was among the first flash memory standards to compete with the earlier and larger PC card Type I memory cards, and was originally built around Intel's NOR-based flash memory, though it switched over to NAND. CF is among the oldest and most successful formats, and has held on to a niche in the professional camera market especially well. It has benefited from having both a good cost to memory size ratio relative to other formats for much of its life, and generally having larger capacities available than smaller formats.
CF cards can be used directly in PC Card slot with a plug adapter, used as an IDE hard drive with a passive adapter, and with a reader, to any number of common ports like USB or FireWire. As it has a bigger size relative to the smaller cards that came later, many other formats can be used directly in a CF card slot with an adapter (including SD/MMC, Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card in a Type I slot, and SmartMedia in a Type II slot, as of 2005) (some multi-card readers use CF for I/O as well).
Flash memory, regardless of format, supports only a limited number of erase/write cycles before a particular "sector" can no longer be written. Memory specifications generally allow 10,000[1] to 1,000,000 write cycles. Typically the controller in a CompactFlash attempts to prevent premature wearout of a sector by mapping the writes to various other sectors in the card - a process referred to as wear levelling.