Some surprising results.

SDHC cards are, let’s face it, the happening thing. With capacities up to 32gB and multiples of that in the offing in a postage stamp-sized medium, CF cards are not going anywhere. Add the fact that one vendor even offers an SDHC card with wireless transmission capability (though it does not support RAW files at the time of writing) and there’s reason to think that the greater bulk and inferior contact mechanism of the CF card (which depends on mating fragile pins with the card as opposed to the SDHC’s far more robust broad wipers) are headed for the technology waste bin. Finally, the burgoening netbook and flash memory markets are not about to use CF cards whereas every netbook and more devices have built-in SD card slots.

So, just for fun, I procured an inexpensive CF-SDHC card adapter ($25) and a bottom-of-the-line Kingston 8gB SDHC card ($18) and tried it in the 5D.

CF-SDHC Jobo card adapter, 8gB Kingston SDHC and 2gB Sandisk CF cards

455 RAW images on one card!

Side loading of the SDHC card in the adapter

While thicker than a CF card, the adapter fits the Canon 5D fine

The comparison, for timings, was a top-of-the-line Sandisk Extreme IV. I expected write times to be much faster with the Extreme IV, and they were. Taking 10 snaps in rapid succession in RAW on the 5D, the red light (indicating write status) on the rear of the camera remained on 16 seconds with the Sandisk compared with 39 seconds for the SDHC+adapter combination after taking the last picture. So if serial shooting in vast quantities is your thing, look elsewhere – the 5D has a 17 image RAW buffer so rapid shooters will find themselves bumping up against this – and slowing snap to snap times – with slower cards.

However, when it came to importing the images into Lightroom 2 (I used a Firewire CF card reader for the Sandisk and a cheap Transcend USB reader for the Kingston), import timings were 28 seconds and 26 seconds respectively. The SDHC card was faster! By contrast placing the SDHC card in the CF adapter and using the Firewire reader took 34 seconds – slower still. So SDHC import using an SDHC USB reader beats CF in Firewire!

Why bother? Because I like to use a netbook (with its SDHC slot) on the road and the built in SDHC card reader is a joy to use – no card adapter to forget. And because fast write times mean little to me, I am quite happy to have 450+ pictures available on one card which also fits a broad gamut of other devices in the home. And, maybe one day, Eye-Fi will produce an SDHC card with wifi built-in which supports RAW files. You won’t be seeing that in the CF format any time soon.

My only niggle is that it would have been nice had the adapter been end- rather than side-loading as the design requires removal of the adapter from the 5D to permit removal of the card. But overall, this is a fine value and I would guess the slower write speed in the camera would be made up for by the use of faster cards, if that matters to you. For me, it’s not an issue.