On 2010-11-07 12:39:15 -0800, Alan Lichtenstein said:

Ron wrote:

"Alan Lichtenstein" wrote in message
...

A friend of mine told me that he had heard from someone at Lexar that
in 2-3 years they would no longer be making CF memory Cards, only
manufacturing SDHC and micro SD cards. I realize that this is third
party hearsay, but has anyone else heard that 'hearsay?' And what about
other manufacturers?


CF cards are used in almost all DSLRs. So CF cards will be around for
a long time. I for one wouldn't cry if Lexar stopped making any memory
cards. Their problem may be a shrinking market share.

I stopped by my local camera shop today after I posted the initial
post. I mentioned what I had heard and the person I usually deal with
said that he had heard pretty much the same. I asked him about other
manufacturers and he said that he heard nothing about their plans. I
use San Disk anyway, and that initially relieved me, however, he added
that with reduced competition, he anticipated the CF cards to become
more expensive.

I would guess the announcement of the demise of the CF card is
premature. Whatever Lexar has decided might be a business decision.
That said there are other sources such as Delkin, Hoodman, Kingston,
Sandisk, etc. but there are changes to the line up eliminating the
slower, less expensive, consumer level CF cards. Therefore the CF cards
offered will be higher speed, and higher priced.

Personally I use Sandisk 60MB/s Extreme UDMA CF, and I have quite a
collection of 30MB/s Sandisk Extreme III CF & SDHC cards, though
through their repositioning they no longer produce the 30MB/s Extreme
III CF, and they have renamed the Extreme III SD to Extreme.
Now they have the 60MB/s Extreme UDMA CF, & the 90MB/s Extreme Pro UDMA
CF. That seems to follow the trend of CF only being used in Pro, or
Pro-sumer level DSLR's.
For the consumer market, they have Ultra SDXC which is 15MB/s, and the
Extreme SDHC @ 30MB/s. They do not have an SD card which comes near the
write/read speed of the UDMA CF cards.


I may be wrong, but when comparing similar manufacturer's CF cards to
their SDHC cards, the CF cards seem to have higher write speeds than
the comparable SDHC cards. I agree that most dSLR's use CF cards,
however, many of them have two slots and can take either. Given the
differences in write speeds, it does appear to me that Lexar's decision
to get out of the CF business is somewhat strange, as dSLR users would
want the faster write speeds. Someone had said that the new Nikon 300
has a single slot. Not using a Nikon, I wouldn't know anything about
that claim either. But I would find it odd.

The Nikon D300 had a single CF slot. The newer D300s has CF, and SD
slots. The secondary slot can be menu set as a parallel back-up, an
overflow for when the primary memory has filled, splitting RAW and JPEG
files onto different cards, or directing video files onto a different
memory card to your still files. It is a useful feature.


--
Regards,

Savageduck