By Andrew Liszewski
Compact flash cards are slowly but surely being pushed out of the digital camera market by SD cards, but there are still plenty of cameras, particularly digital SLRs, that rely on the older format. So companies like RIDATA haven’t given up on CF just yet, and to prove it they’ve just introduced an updated version they call the SMART compact flash card.
As far as I can tell what makes these cards ‘SMART’ is a new internal data monitoring system that works to ensure you never experience any data loss. While having 16GB of storage in your camera is great, it’s not a pleasant feeling when something happens to the only card you’ve been shooting with the past few days. And besides extra data monitoring, the cards also include embedded error correction code (ECC) that supports “two random bits of a sector on-the-fly ECC corrections.” I’ll assume that’s a good thing.
The new cards even offer longer reliability, with a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 5,000,000 powered-on hours, and 100,000 times of program/erase cycles. The SMART CF cards will be available in two series, a Supreme 150X version with a capacity of up to 8GB, and a Lightning version with a capacity of up 16GB.
[ RIDATA SMART Compact Flash Cards ] VIA [ Digital Photography Review ]
