SD Memory Cards Forever?

[Mike Farley]

Back in the day, most digital cameras used Compact Flash memory cards. A few manufacturers tried to introduce other formats, but nothing stuck until SD came along. Inserting a Compact Flash card into a camera always makes me uneasy. There is the possibility of bricking a body by bending the connecting pins inside which are integral to the main circuit board. Fortunately, I have never done that with a camera but have ruined a few card readers that way. SD, with flat contacts on the card, gets around that issue. Now, successors to SD are starting to appear in cameras so does SD have a future? According to PetaPixel, it will be around for a few years yet.

https://petapixel.com/2019/12/14/sd-car ... heres-why/

I would add that while the latest memory card formats are fast, most stills photographers do not need that speed. A decent UHS-i card will be quick enough for most purposes and are cheap to buy these days. It is video where the benefits of higher transfer speed are more useful.

[Franke07]

This is yet another march of progress, but is warp speed really needed!
I still have my cynical hat on so my response to this is, this is yet another tactic to extract more notes from the consumers wallet. But I think they are just putting it out there in much the same way as they did with the eject-able media 5 1/4 3 1/2 disks - probably showing my age!)
Look at the mobile phone makers with their non replaceable batteries. forcing you to upgrade or carry around an additional charging source .

With my logical head on it may just be a further indication that the resolution wars are not over and they intend to produce such huge files that we will warp speed to transfer them to our computers - Good job storage is relatively cheap!

Re the CF cards I was on a landscape course some moons ago where I witnessed the CF to brick trick. One of the attendees turned up with a brand new Canon 30D and on the first day of the course went to insert the CF card, unfortunately he put it in back to front crushing several of the interface pins - we could not straighten them out so he spent the rest of the course shooting with his point and shoot!

[Mike Farley]

This is yet another march of progress, but is warp speed really needed!
I still have my cynical hat on so my response to this is, this is yet another tactic to extract more notes from the consumers wallet. But I think they are just putting it out there in much the same way as they did with the eject-able media 5 1/4 3 1/2 disks - probably showing my age!)
Look at the mobile phone makers with their non replaceable batteries. forcing you to upgrade or carry around an additional charging source .

With my logical head on it may just be a further indication that the resolution wars are not over and they intend to produce such huge files that we will warp speed to transfer them to our computers - Good job storage is relatively cheap!

Return of investment in R&D, manufacturing facilities etc. will doubtless be a factor and I suspect the high price is geared towards recovering the outlay as quickly as possible. XQD, the forerunner of the new CF cards, is starting to fall in price. A 32 GB XQD card can be had for around £80 currently, which is what I paid for a 256 MB Compact Flash card in the early days of digital. And that was a bargain at the time.

As to whether these developments herald further increments in resolution, I suspect that the faster cards are more geared towards video. A minute's worth of 8K shooting will account for 6 GB of data, so fast transfer speeds and high capacity are a prerequisite.

Re the CF cards I was on a landscape course some moons ago where I witnessed the CF to brick trick. One of the attendees turned up with a brand new Canon 30D and on the first day of the course went to insert the CF card, unfortunately he put it in back to front crushing several of the interface pins - we could not straighten them out so he spent the rest of the course shooting with his point and shoot!

I winced, reading that. The cards have a small lip at the non business end and the grooves which help guide the card into place do not run all the way down the sides, so your acquaintance must have pushed it in with some determination. Most likely through not being familiar with the camera ahead of the course. It would have been an expensive lesson.

[Mike Farley]

PetaPixel has a follow up article about the future of SD. Or, rather, the lack of it. CFexpress comes from a competing organisation and the SD consortium put forward its own proposal for high speed cards, but it seems unlikely it will ever get into production. Aside from being slower than its competitor, unlike CF which has no concerns about legacy, the SD group wanted to achieve backward compatibility with the existing SD standard. Unfortunately, that adds to costs and the new card would only function at UHS-I speed even when used in with a UHS-II capable device.

https://petapixel.com/2019/12/18/sds-re ... n-arrival/