The Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Green Side Up. That’s the punchline of an old joke, but applies to us digital imagers as well.

CompactFlash cards use Flash technology, a non-volatile storage media that doesn’t lose information when power is removed. It’s noiseless, lighter, consumes less battery power, and is more rugged than the rotating disks used by other digital camera media. How rugged?

At one of my recent digital photography workshops a student couldn’t insert a CompactFlash card into her brand-new Canon EOS D60. I tried gently inserting the card, but it would not seat on the 50-pins inside the camera. I reached for one of the most useful devices in my camera bag-a MagLite penlight-and peered into the dark recesses of the slot. Three of the pins were bent. How do you bend the pins inside a CompactFlash slot in a professional SLR like the D60? With great difficulty as another joke goes, but she proved it was possible to put a card in backwards (or maybe upside down) and in doing so bent the pins. No CF cards in the slot -- pictures.

Yet the cards themselves are tough. My pal, photojournalist Barry Staver, recently removed a pair of pants from his clothes dryer and found a CompactFlash card he used for an assignment. Although the card had gone through a complete cycle in both washing machine and dryer, when he inserted it into the card reader connected to his computer, he saw that all of the image files were intact and ready to go.

In other CF news: By default, Microsoft Windows XP formats 64MB or larger CompactFlash cards, using the FAT32 format. (32-bit File Allocation Table) Digital cameras and other devices use the FAT (16-bit) format and won’t work with a FAT32-formatted card. Always format cards in camera (which is what I always do) or select FAT when formatting your card with a Windows XP computer.

Joe Farace is a Colorado-based photographer and author of "The Photographer’s Internet Handbook" and 23 other books about photography and digital imaging. To order his books or find the location of Joe’s next digital photography workshop visit www.joefarace.com.

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