Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Is the "Anniversary Edition" really SD or SDHC?

My "big" camera is a Nikon D50. It is a wonderful camera, but it is getting a bit dated and only takes regular SD cards, not SDHC. As I understand it, the SD specification is limited to 2GB, but the hardware can handle a full 4GB of addressing. The SD standards people artificially lowered the standard to 2GB either to move people to the SDHC standard faster or for some technical reason I don't yet understand. Are there technical issues with some devices and 4GB FAT16 partitions?

There is also evidently a requirement in the standard that SDHC cards be FAT32-formatted. Older cameras (like the D50) can't read this filesystem even if it were present on a small capacity card. The neat part of all of this is that some "4GB SDHC" cards are actually plain old SD cards electrically and just rebadged as SDHC since a 4GB card isn't allowed to have the 'SD' logo. What I'm saying here is all speculation on my part that I've pieced together from some very reliable web forums. :)

There have been some reports that, if you get one of these cards, simply formatting a 4GB FAT32 SDHC card as the older FAT16 will make it work in cameras like my D50. I really wonder if this new Anniversary Edition card is one of these special beasts. It would make sense for Eye-Fi to do this since "all" they'd have to do is replace the on board flash with a bigger chip and wouldn't have to change the card electrically to support true SDHC. For $79 shipped at Costco, I just may have to find out!

1 comment:

Julianno Jungle said...

Hi, your posts rocks, im opening my mind with your quotes ^^
I wanna just make a question: Did u understand the boot process of the card once it is inside the camera?
I mean, it have a risc processor, ram and rom inside the atheos chip. Just energize it putting it inside the camera and it starts up its os (eCOS?), connect to a wi-fi hotspot and do the upload process, blablabla. I just dont get where the os is? At rom inside atheos? in some hidden sector of the card? when it starts (when we turn on the camera), how it is loaded?

Im planning to write a different routine to the eye-fi card. Any clue?

Thanks at all and sorry for the very bad english, im brazillian.
Julianno