compactflash

Lexar said Tuesday it's increased the capacity of its midrange professional CompactFlash memory cards with a 300X transfer speed to 32GB.

Lexar, which competes chiefly with Sandisk for the attentions of photographers who need both high capacity and high transfer speeds, has been fleshing out its CF cards that can transfer data faster by virtue of the UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) interface technology. Lexar already announced in October a 32GB card and a transfer speed of 600X (90MBps), but the 300X (45MBps) card should do fine for those who don't need quite that data transfer speed.

Lexar … Read more

Mainstream servers are growing increasingly brawny with multicore processors and tremendous memory capacity, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh think 98-pound weaklings of the computing world might be better suited for many of the jobs on the Internet today.

The alternative the researchers advocate is named FAWN, short for Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes. It's described in a paper just presented at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.

In short, the researchers believe some work can be managed with lower expense and lower power consumption using a cluster of servers built with lower-end processors and flash memory than with a general-purpose server. And these days, with green technology in vogue and power costs no longer an afterthought, efficient computing is a big deal.

"We were looking at efficiency at sub-maximum load. We realized the same techniques could serve high loads more efficiently as well," said David Andersen, the Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of computer science who helped lead the project. … Read more

Despite its being out of vogue at the moment, I'm still a big believer in the faster-is-better philosophy. That said, I also recognize that it's not always worth the extra cost for some people, and that not everyone can or will always take advantage of it. So that's why I always take announcements about new, high-performance media cards, like SanDisk's 90 megabyte-per-second Extreme Pro line (along with Transcend's similar 600X CF), with a grain of salt. And after running some casual tests on the new card, I've concluded that for now, even only a … Read more

The new SDXC specification for faster, higher-capacity flash cards emerged in January, and Toshiba now promises the cards themselves will begin arriving about a year afterward.

Toshiba said Monday it expects to be the first to bring SDXC cards to market, with testing samples of a 64GB version shipping in November and the real thing shipping in the spring of 2010. Those dates will be key moments in what doubtless will be a gradual transition away from the prevailing SDHC standard.

SDXC backers promise higher capacities and data transfer speeds for SDXC, which is important for devices such as video … Read more

Admittedly, CompactFlash cards are no longer as popular as they were when digital photography first started. These days, most digicams use SD/SDHC media, while mobile phones mainly accept the physically smaller microSD format for storing data.

This is why I'm puzzled as to the reason PhotoFast has conceived the CR-7200, a CompactFlash card adapter capable of holding four microSD cards and combining their storage space. Given that the maximum a microSD card can now hold is 16GB, the CR-7200's capacity would be capped at 64GB.

Although manufacturers such as Pretec and Transcend have announced 64GB CompactFlash cards, … Read more

The camera industry and photographers, having just gotten accustomed to the arrival of video in point-and-shoot cameras, just now are beginning to grapple with its arrival in the more serious SLR realm.

Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon's professional products marketing division and a 26-year veteran at the Japanese company, is in the thick of it. Nikon was the first to market with a single-lens reflex camera equipped with video, the D90, but Canon offers video in two SLRs: the high-end EOS 5D Mark II, with a large sensor the size of a full frame of 35mm film, and the Rebel T1i, a more affordable, mainstream model.

These cameras combine high-definition video--1900x1080 pixels at 30 frames per second in the case of the 5D Mark II--with SLRs' advantages when shooting in dim conditions and with a broad variety of lenses. But even though today's video SLR features offers hold some appeal to enthusiasts and professionals, they're something of an awkward afterthought. SLRs and those who use them that haven't yet had much time to adapt.

Welcome to the world of digital photography, where change is incessant. In an interview with CNET News, Westfall talked about not just video, but also OLED displays, the arrival of rival full-frame SLRs from Sony and Nikon, changing flash card and file format standards, wireless networking, and more.

Question: The age of the video SLR has begun. A lot of people in the high-end camera market are set in their ways, and video is a radical difference for a lot of them. How does that change the camera design, the marketing, and everything you have to do to sell a camera?… Read more

LAS VEGAS--Lexar plans to introduce faster, higher-capacity CompactFlash cards using a new generation of the flash memory technology, a company executive said Wednesday.

Lexar's current top-end 300X-rated CompactFlash cards use a standard called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) to transfer data at 45MB/second, and their capacity tops out at 16GB. But using a new generation of the standard, UDMA 6, Lexar will release cards that have significantly faster transfer speeds and larger capacity, Jeff Cable, director of marketing, said in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

Cable wouldn't be pinned down on precise details, but he said the new cards' capacity "probably" would be 32GB, and their transfer speeds likely would "pretty close to" UDMA 6's threshold of 100MB/sec, which is more than double that of today's UDMA.

Only newer SLR (single lens reflex) cameras support current UDMA technology, but it's spreading, and there are benefits. For example, cameras can take longer continuous bursts of photos, and photographers can zoom faster to check focus when reviewing shots on the camera LCD. Video, which is arriving in new SLRs, also can saturate data-transfer pathways. … Read more

Pretec, a maker of CompactFlash cards including very high-capacity ones, on Tuesday brought the speed of CF cards to a new high.

The company unveiled what we believe to be the world's first CF that offers speed up to 666x, which translates to about 100MBps. This is about four times the speed of a typical CF card and getting close to the theoretical maximum speed of the CF specification, which is 133MBps.

(To further increase the maximum speed of CF cards, the CompactFlash Association has released the new generation of the CF specification, called CFast, which breaks the 133MBps … Read more