Looks like Self Monitoring Analysis and Real Time Reporting Technology (SMART) is now available in Compact Flash as well.  SMART has been around for many years and is usually available in magnetic hard drive. Almost all hard drive in the market now  has SMART and can easily be enabled via your motherboard BIOS.  Not sure how SMART is going to be enabled for CF.  Basically, SMART provides a standard method for checking the health of mass-storage devices whilst Error Correction Code (ECC) verifies the datastream to catch and correct any errors. 

Hopefully, we will have SMART in all our removable medias in future ... nowadays, the flash drive is not as good as the older ones.  I have data failure occasionally on my new TwinMOS SD that I bought a couple of months back.  I also have bad experience of failure with my Pendrive flash drive after the warranty expires ... :(.

Press release: 

RIDATA SMART Compact Flash Card

Featuring Self-Monitoring Analysis and Real Time Reporting Technology to Monitor CF Card Status.

1/2/2008 – Diamond Bar, Calif. – Advanced Media, Inc., is a manufacturer and marketer of the popular RIDATA brand of recordable CD and DVD media, electronic storage products, and digital media accessories. The company is introducing the first Smart Compact Flash™ Cards at CES 2008. Featuring high-speed access to reading and writing and up to 16GB of storage capacity, the self-monitoring CF card is ideal for virtually any flash media storage application.

“We are pleased to introduce the RIDATA SMART CompactFlash Card, which is the first of its kind in the industry,” stated Harvey Liu, Advanced Media president. “The flash memory market is growing quickly due to the number of new applications that use flash media for storage. As capacity continues to increase, RIDATA saw the need for an internal data monitoring system to ensure the safety of your data.”

The new rugged, reliable, RIDATA memory cards are available in two series of "Supreme 150X (up to 8GB capacity-SLC format)" and "Lightning (up to 16GB MLC format)". It features innovative functionalities such as Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology so users can easily monitor the CF card’s status. The card is capable of providing notification to users in real time to protect vital information and data.

Reliability and Endurance
The new Smart Card offers long-term reliability and endurance with a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 5,000,000 powered-on hours. It also offers maximum endurance of 100,000 times of program/erase cycles. Its embedded Error Correction Code (ECC) supports two random bits of a sector on-the-fly ECC corrections.

Compatibilities
Ridata’s Smart Card conforms to the CompactFlash Association Standard, the PC Card standard and is PC Card ATA and true IDE Mode compatible. It is also host ATA disk I/O BIOS DOS/Windows file system, utilities and application software compatible. The controller supports Ultra DMA Mode to Mode 4. Also supported is CIS implemented with 256 bytes of attributed memory. Lastly it supports 8 or 16 bit host transfers with any host speed using Input/Output channel ReaDY (IORDY).

Power Savings
Another feature of the RIDATA Smart CompactFlash™ Card is its low power consumption. In standby mode with an automatic power management function, users acquire longer battery life from a digital camera or other device. The non-volatile card requires no power to store data, but requires a 3.3V/5V single power supply to read and write data.

File Systems
Regarding the 4GB, 8GB and 16GB CF cards, users should use the cards on devices that support a FAT32 file system. Some older devices only support FAT16 file system and these systems have a maximum capacity of a 2GB CF card. Please refer to the owner’s manual for the device’s file system compatibility.

In a saga which (publicly) began in December last year and has seen Pentax fighting Hoya's approaches on various fronts including the resignation of their president Fumio Urano last month and talk of selling its headquarters in Tokyo looks to be finally coming to an end. According to numerous reports Pentax's board of directors has today approved the deal and the merger will go ahead next month. Additionally Pentax's board members have agreed to resign after the Hoya takeover goes through.

Source: DPReview 

Thu May 25, 2006 8:52am ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Canon Inc. (7751.T: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Thursday that it would consider halting development of new film cameras as it focuses resources on digital models, the latest sign of the rapidly fading role of film in photography.

A spokesman at Canon, the world's largest digital camera maker, said it would consider whether it needs to continue developing both compact and single lens reflex (SLR) film models because the markets for both are shrinking.

Canon said it would continue to produce and sell existing models and make a final judgment on the business in the future while monitoring market demand.

Canon's statement follows an announcement earlier this year by rival Nikon Corp. (7731.T: Quote, Profile, Research) that it would stop producing most of its film cameras, expect for a few professional products.

Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. (4902.T: Quote, Profile, Research), meanwhile, has said it would exit the camera and photo film markets, where it has been losing money amid stiff competition and weak demand.

The photographic film and film camera markets have been shrinking rapidly in the past few years due to the rising popularity of digital cameras, which can take and store photos without the need for film.

My Comment:
Will this mean the end of film SLR? With two biggest SLR manufacturers putting an end to their film camera, I don't think film SLR or even any film camera will survive much longer. And with some of the film manufacturers closing shop, film will be very expensive some day. To those film enthusiasts, go stock up more film .... :).

If you take RAW most of the times, you may want to take part in the survey conducted by a non-profit organisation OpenRAW . Hopefully, this will provide some guidance to all the camera manufacturers & RAW converter softwares out there.

Together let's say no to RAW encryption as practised by some camera manufacturers recently.

This survey was launched on January 31st, 2006 and will remain open until March 31st, 2006. Hurry up, let our voice be listened !!!

Here is the link to the survey.

This year PMA (Photo Marketing Association) Annual Show 2006 will be held at Orange County Convention Center, Orlando between February 26th and March 1st 2006.  Well, it's just under one month away and photography enthusiasts are getting excited.

For those who are new in photography, PMA is the photography industry's most important annual event and during this event, a lot of latest and hottest digital camera are showcased.  Other related products (including photo editing software) will also be showcased.

As before, PMA 2006 will definitely be an event to watch out for.  As of today, Canon & Nikon have yet to announce their latest digital camera.  To keep yourself updated with this event, you can always go to dpreview website specially created to keep track of this event from pre-PMA stage till the post-PMA stage as shown below:

- PMA 2006 Show Report Live 

Hopefully, we will see many more full-framed dSLR at a much cheaper price this year ... :).  In the meantime, have fun !!!

 

Finally .... I managed to move to this new blog from my old blog http://photographytips.textmalaysia.com.

Spent my whole lunch hour setting up this blog and moving each posting one-by-one .... well, at last ... http://foo-tography.textmalaysia.com is now ready !!!

Oh yeah, thanks to the original Ikan for the new glamourous name for this blog:

FOO-tography

Happy New Year to everyone !!!

Welcome to this new blog page ... which is specially created for photography enthusiasts and amateur photographers from all over the world.

The aim of this blog is to share as much tips and tricks that have been frequently asked over and over again. This means I will not be biased on the equipment owned by you. Even a Point-And-Shoot (P&S) camera will be able to benefit on these tips and tricks.

However, you may notice that there may be some references made to Canon and Nikon even though I claimed that I will not be biased. Why? Well, the only reason is because I am more familiar with these two gigantic camera manufacturers than any others. Hence, wherever there is a need to illustrate an example, I will use Canon and/or Nikon to make it easier to understand. If you are using other camera manufacturers, it should not be a problem for you to figure out this minor differences as what we are interested in are the photography tips and tricks ... and not the camera ... :).

Hope you will enjoy your stay here .... :). And if you have any questions that you want me to help, please drop me a message.

Have fun !!!

 

Added 17-Jan-2006.

P/S: Thanks a lot to the original Ikan for the glamourous name: FOO-tography.