Posted on by Terry White

Use SD cards in your Compact Flash gear

Chances are that if you’re using an DSLR camera that uses Compact Flash cards, you’re pretty happy with the cards you’re using. However, there are times that it would be nice to be able use the SD card format in my Compact Flash (CF) gear. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t think of too many times (like never) that I would want to stick an SD card into my Nikon D300 or D700. However, there are times that someone will hand me an SD card with pictures on it and I only have either my Firewire 800 CF reader or my ExpressCard slot CF Reader with me. As a matter of fact that very thing just happened to me this past Sunday. I was at my users group meeting and there was a member there taking pictures and at the end of the meeting he handed me his SDHC SD card. I didn’t have my multi-format card reader with me. All I had was my FW800 CF Reader. Luckily I had a USB cable and we just connected his camera to my computer directly to transfer the pics.

 

The CFMulti

Actually the CFMulti by Synchrotech is designed and promoted to allow the use of EyeFi SD Wi-Fi cards in CF based cameras (like many of the popular DSLRs out there today). There’s no software to install. You simply insert your SD card in the bottom of this adapter and then put the adapter (SD card and all) in your Compact Flash based device. As I’ve written in the past, I’m not a fan of the EyeFi card. I think it’s cool technology, but just not very usable (at least for me.) So if all this thing did was support the EyeFi card in CF based cameras, then I could really care less.

The picture I painted above is really the situation that I use the CFMulti in. With the CFMulti I can now just carry my favorite, fastest card reader(s) and not have to worry about not being able to read the occasional SD cards.

The CFMulti is going for $28 on the Synchrotech website.

4 Replies to “Use SD cards in your Compact Flash gear”

  2. Jeremy,
    That’s exactly what it’s designed to do. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

  3. Thanks for the tip, Terry! With SD being a lot cheaper for higher capacity this might be an attractive offer for a lot of us. Is there any word on the speed of the card?

    Thank you, again.

  4. If the makers of high end cameras wanted to use the smaller chips, they would have. The fact they didn’t tells you something. Think of this as a “for emergency only” choice, not a way to use a less expensive type of memory. Or, use it as an adapter to read data from the cards via a CF Reader, as Terry does.

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