Semperfi, you could be correct. My comment is based on information gleaned from the www.dcresource.com digital camera discussion board.
It’s the answer supplied whenever someone wanted to know if they could use a larger capacity SM card in their camera.
And I did not mean to say by using the word controller that there was a discrete device involved. Just that the maximum card capacity for a SM device was due to constraints built into the device rather than into the card.
Whaaaa? AFAIK all professional DSLR cameras use compact flash. I can think of only one amateur DSLR that uses a different medium. The new entry level D50 from Nikon uses SD but they continue to make the CF/Microdrive compatible D70 as well as their professional cameras which use the CFI/II format cards.
Microdrives have some popularity because they have a lower cost per megabyte but on the down side they slower than CF, consume more power and are more fragie. I have been using a 1GB microdrive for nearly four years but I trust it less and less.
What other flash memory formats besides CF and Sony memory stick have a multi gigabyte capacity?
minor7flat5, the only SD device I have is a Palm Tungsten E and have a 1gb card for it so I can use it as an MP3 player.
CF cards also have a true IDE mode on their controller - hence the MicroDrives.
I own an Epson PhotoPC 700 (from about 1998 or so), and all the equipment specs I can find state that the max it can take is Type I 32MB - that’s even what their tech support said a couple of years ago when I was going to be a 64MB card for vacation. Well, so far I haven’t found a limit other than the number of available pictures left counter (I maxed it out at 999 with a 512 CF card :)).
Regarding higher end equipment you may well be right. I was researching consumer-level items. There were plenty of CF cameras available in the 1.0-2.0 megapixel non-bells-and-whistles range but not so much anymore. Most of the devices I’ve shopped for have switched to SD (or xD/SM depending on manufacturer). I have no use for laptops so haven’t looked into those, my comments were strictly about lower-end cameras.
If you are talking about SD then you would have been just fine with a 1 gig card. While most manufacturers only test their cameras up to a certain point, I’ve never heard of one that doens’t work with a 1 gig SD card, which are pretty standard these days.
This is my understanding as well from when I had an SmartMedia camera.
Compact Flash is most certainly not dead. In fact, the cards have gotten so large that there’s not much point in getting a microDrive anymore, what with their slowness, increased battery use, and catastrophic failure mode. True, they are more common in dSLRs but they are still available in many consumer camera models. They currently come in 8gig size. The maximum size for SD is 2gig.