Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC)* announced its new highest capacity 4- gigabyte (GB)(1) CompactFlash card, and high-speed 2GB CompactFlash card. The new cards, developed by Toshiba Corp. (Toshiba) using 90 nanometer (nm) NAND Flash memory technology, help meet the continually increasing demand for greater capacity and performance in data storage cards for digital cameras, digital camcorders, MP3 players and PDAs, as well as some networking and embedded applications.

The high density of the new THNCF4G09PG 4GB card is achieved by combining four of Toshiba's 8- gigabit (Gb)(3) multi-level-cell (MLC) components in the matchbook-sized CompactFlash memory card packaging, and the standard 2GB card, designated THNCF2G04PG contains two of the 8Gb MLC components. Toshiba's 8Gb MLC NAND Flash memory is currently composed of two MLC 4Gb NAND chips in a single TSOP package. MLC NAND stores two bits of information in each memory cell, compared to one bit-per-cell for Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash, and provides excellent cost/ performance value well suited for use in low to high-end digital still cameras, camcorders and MP3 players.

For applications requiring both high capacity and faster write and erase performance, TAEC has added the new 2GB THNCF2G04DG High Speed CompactFlash Card. The High Speed CompactFlash Card is based on SLC NAND Flash technology, which stores one bit per cell, and utilizes an optimized controller with large block NAND technology to achieve higher data transfer rates, approximately twice as fast as the standard speed cards. The high-speed card is targeted for very demanding applications in digital photography, digital video, high resolution digital still cameras, PDAs, other high- end portable electronics products equipped with a CompactFlash Card slot.

Toshiba's MLC NAND exceeds the minimum read and write requirements of several digital video formats by implementing advanced design concepts and adjusting the control system of the memory cell. Based on published bandwidth requirements, Toshiba's MLC NAND devices offer more than sufficient performance to support the minimum read and write specifications of various DVD-quality digital video file formats, including MPEG2(5), MPEG4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC)(6) or H.264, and Windows Media(R) 9.05 files.

Among the findings of the study is that the 10,000 write/erase cycles of MLC NAND Flash are more than sufficient for extended use in digital photography applications. For example, the new 4GB card can store an estimated 156 uncompressed images(2) from an 8 megapixel camera, or 2,000 images(7) using standard compression ratios. With its 10,000 write/erase cycles, the user would be able to store approximately 1.5 million uncompressed pictures or 20 million JPG compressed images within the expected life of the card.

For more details on the performance study, please visit
http:// mlcnand.toshiba.com/.

Samples of Toshiba's standard CompactFlash card are available now, priced at US$299.99/unit for the 2GB and US$499.99/unit for the 4GB, each.

Interesting - but how is this different from the Sandisk 4gb card?

What are the advantages of CF cards over other types such as SD, MS, XD, etc? I feel they're quite bulky, and I feel that SD cards have matched them in performance already.

Bulky? have you ever seen the size of a roll of film?!? CF has emerged has the dominant digital memory standard and, because this is the case, they're available relatively cheaply in high capacities. For many people, though, comparing different formats is a bit of a non-discussion, as all cameras are format-specific: even if you liked xD cards, for example, you couldn't shunt one into, say, a Nikon D70...

I recall reading about the tradeoffs between the various card standards. Size is one, read/write speed (in at least a couple of varieties), and so on. The reason the article stuck in my mind was they talked about power consumption, something I'd always assumed wasn't a great factor.

Apparently, apart from size, the xD was designed for low power consumption. I saw the xD -and the Memory Stick, even worse, with the regular and the duo- as being proprietary and expensive negatives to the otherwise nice Fuji, Olympus and Sony cameras.

CF has the advantage of being the oldest standard, a truly open standard, and having the greatest amount of real estate for future development of even higher capacities. These days I don't thing SD gives up anything to CF.

By the way, I saw in today's paper that J&R is selling 1GB PNY SD cards for $30, 512MB for $15!

It's not strictly relevant to digital cameras (OK, it's not relevant at all! ), but Compactflash is the only format that implements an IDE interface.

The upshot is that with a $10 mechanical adapter, you can hook one up to a PC and use it as if it were a normal Hard drive with no additional software. OK, so a 2, 4 or even 8GB drive doesn't sound like much, but it's great for building a very low-power PC that doesn't need to store anything locally. You can build an entire PC that consumes less than 30W. It's quiet, too, and assuming you mount it read-only, should be more reliable than a mechanical drive, too.

It's the sort of thing that's perfect for a small firewall/router or a media box hooked up to a TV that gets all the media from another server on the network.

Like I said, it's not exactly the most relevant thing for digital cameras, but it's handy nonetheless...

Yes, we're going off topic...

Fortunately for those wanting to run dedicated-systems there's a lot that run Linux and don't NEED the high specs of a new system (for Windows). Some even run diskless and boot/operate off a floppy disk. I run an astaro.com (free for home use) router at home on a dedicated PC.

If you want/have more recent hardware, many newer motherboards support booting/reading USB "drives" whether a flash-drive or "flash memory reader".

Being able to "natively emulate" an IDE drive only with CF is something I didn't realize, but that does give a pretty powerful interface to use in new and older hardware (old enough to not have USB mass storage legacy/DOS/boot capability).

I'm seeing some 4GB SD cards available now too.

The "micro hard drives" are pretty "massive in a small package" but to me things that small ARE portable and so I'd want them to be rugged and anticiapte using them while in movement. Solid state non-volitile flash memory is just more rugged than the mechanical disks (not that those tiny hard drive based "CF" form factor drives aren't a miracle of engineering and capacity and are not terribly fragile!) I wasn't too impressed with a 4GB disk based CF card I saw year ago which seemed reliable but slowed to a crawl after some save/deletes (due to file fragmentation). - For "random access data" there's a lot to be said for solid state memory media! (for data only needing serial data - like video - I think tape will remain viable for a while since it is so cheap and fits the requirements so well. Eventually, however, I believe tapes will be replaced by solid state memory as prices fall another 10x.)

I don't think CF is obsolete by any means, but I note that I've only bought 1 piece of CF this year (slickdeal) while I've gotten several SDs. The price/MB seems about equal for SD and CF now with/without sales (and both xD and MS still cost a bit more). I can use the SD in my media players and cameras while the CF I can only use in one old camera or (with a PCMCIA adapter) in my living room DVD/media player.

think there's no big difference - but what I really know about sandisk is that they are really "high-priced" (at my local dealer up to 25% expenciver)

about the quality I can say that I have never had a problem with any kind of card, but just the same I'm trying to the pictures as fast as possible to another storage device.

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Digital SLR Cameras
Digital Point & Shoot Cameras