My new Kingston 50x 4Gb Compact Flash card

With the Compact Flash card price recently dropped to a reasonable level, I finally bite the bullet and got the Kingston 50x 4Gb Compact Flash card for HK$1190. There's another brand called Transcend selling a 120x 4Gb CF card for HK$1280, but since I trust Kingston because of all my positive experience with it, I went for Kingston.

I tested it right away on my DELL x50v Pocket PC by copying a 680Mb video file from the slow (24x) Toshiba SD card to the 4Gb CF card, and it was proven to be such a ultra long process. It took almost 1.5 hours to get the file from SD card to the 4Gb CF card! And it generate a lot of heat during the process.

I also tried copying a 3.21Gb MPEG video file from my PC harddisk to the 4Gb CF card. It took 24 minutes. Not too bad. HOWEVER, I also found out that Pocket PC couldn't recognize this 3Gb video, and treated it as a FOLDER! I suspect that the OS of Pocket PC simply cannot handle any file with size bigger than 2Gb.

Even with the 1.8Gb MPEG video file that plays on the Pocket PC, I found a little bit of frame skipping here and there when I played it on TCPMP. It turns out that the problem is on the video file itself. The file was captured using a cheap chessy USB 1.x based video capture device, and thus the quality of the videos aren't up the par. Still, I recorded a few TV shows and they looks decent enough for brief watching. That seems to be good enough for me.

And then I found out that my 4Gb CF card has to be formatted in FAT32, and unfortunately my SuperCard (for Nintendo DS) can only take CF card formatted in FAT. That means my 4Gb CF cannot be used in my Nintendo DS.

Am I disappointed by all these findings? A bit. But then I will still buy the 4Gb card if I have to choose again since:

(1) If I buy a 2Gb SD card, I still get into the problem which I need to swap out the CF card whenever I need to test drive some new NDS game.

(2) If I buy a 2Gb CF card, I still haven't maximize the usage of the space provided by the CF slot. See my original purpose of getting a big card is because I want a get a card as big as possible (yet price reasonably) so that I can carry tons of stuff with my Pocket PC everywhere I go.

So I will still get the 4Gb. But then, I was wondering if I should take the risk and try out the 120x 4Gb card. Oh well.