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| LAPTOP | NOTEBOOK | COMPUTER | HARDWARE |Why do many laptops ignore CompactFlash?
You might have noticed that nearly all of our laptops have a built-in reader for at least one flash memory standard. There are 5 major families of flash memory: Secure Digital/MMC (SD), SmartMedia, MemoryStick, xD, and CompactFlash (CF). Since xD is a pretty new standard and there aren't many xD cameras in use yet, it hasn't been implemented yet. Usually, a laptop will have at least a SD slot and often MemoryStick support.
The reason is that those are the two physically smallest formats. Any laptop that has a multi-format card reader will read SmartMedia memory even though that type of flash memory is not being developed, but only the 7-in-1 memory card readers will read CompactFlash.
This wouldn't be a big deal except that CompactFlash is pretty much the standard for high-end digital cameras, used by Canon, Nikon, and Kodak on all digital SLR and most prosumer cameras. It's also very common for PDAs to have CF interfaces. The reason that CompactFlash rarely has its own port is primarily due to its space requirements. CF is physically the largest of all the types of flash memory. The decision of the manufacturer is that if they are going to put a big CF port on the laptop, they might as well put all the other interfaces on it as well.
One lesser-known fact about CompactFlash is that it has a PCMCIA interface built-in; it is basically a small version of a PCMCIA card. The upside is that PCMCIA to CompactFlash adapters are dirt cheap because they are just some metal and wires that change the shape of the CompactFlash card to fit in a PCMCIA slot.
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