I'm gonna have to disagree with this one. CF is very much alive and well, because they are FAST and large.


The fastest available SDHC card is Class 6 (actually Class 10 but no presently available devices read these cards at that rate of sustained throughput so it's a moot point). That's several times slower than a CF UDMA card.


The next revision of SD, "SDXC" or "SD 3.0," should be fast and large enough to compare with current-generation CF, but by then we will soon see CF cards that are even faster, and have higher capacities, to meet the demands of faster frame rates and high-definition video. As it stands SDHC Class 6 is theoretically barely fast enough to write 1080p HD, whereas CF can handle it easily--and take intervening stills. Future CF standards would allow data transfer rates as fast as 300 MB/s, fast enough to record 21 MP stills @ 10fps. SDXC will top out at about 100 MB/s.


CF is still around because of three very important reasons: (1) unlike SD, it is intrinsically DRM-free. (2) its form factor is small enough to be convenient but not so small to impose significant constraints on capacity, speed, or durability. (3) it has always been the fastest and most robust flash memory format commercially available.


Don't get me wrong, I fully realize that the vast majority of the flash memory market is composed of SD. But that doesn't mean CF is dying--all it means is that SD has become the de facto choice for small portable devices. But for applications that require fast speed and high capacities, CF is still a necessity. In other words, the dominance of SD is not so much about its superiority over CF, but rather, a result of the fact that one format is designed for the mass consumer market, and the other has become the standard choice for the "pro" market, which is inherently smaller. Just imagine how they would react if CF were phased out with nothing to take its place technologically. How could photographers function? As long as we have cameras that need such speed and capacity, we will always have CF.