I’ve never been a huge fan of SD cards. I can point to reasons, some sound some maybe not so much, but given the choice, I’d much prefer to use CF to SD given the choice. Maybe this stems from some initial bias; my first digital cameras, even the crappy point and shoots, were all compact flash based. So was my first SLR, and all my current SLRs.

It’s not totally an irrational bias; there are good reasons to prefer compact flash. For starters the cards are bigger that SD cards. Bigger cards are easier to find if you drop them, and easier to handle with gloves on. CF cards are generally faster, even at comparable sizes and rated speeds.

Actually, let me talk about speed for a moment. That too has long been one of my problems with SD cards. They’re slow, or at least that’s always been my perception of them. I was pleasantly surprised when I benchmarked a 32GB Lexar 400X card to find it wasn’t atrociously slow. No, it wasn’t as fast as the 32GB 400X UDMA compact flash cards I normally use, but its performance wasn’t radically worse either (6.5% slower at writes, 12.5% slower reads). The key difference, write speed, is so meaningless it isn’t even worth whining about.

Of course, SD cards have one huge advantage over compact flash, cost. Where a 1000x UDMA7 CF card can run upwards of the cost of an entry level SLR, the reasonably sized (8-16GB), reasonably fast (400x) SD cards I use are in the $10-30 range. Why put the wear and tear—and yes the NAND flash memory in flash cards wears out eventually, and not on 1000 year scales, but more like several 1000 write cycles scales—on expensive CF cards when their advantages aren’t needed?

Until earlier this year, I was pretty die-hard against SD cards in cameras, at least at the prosumer and pro level. I’m still not the biggest fan on of them, at the same time, other than when shooting video or when I know I’m going to want to shoot larger bursts at high FPS, I’m shooting almost everything on cheap, comparatively disposable—at least I won’t be crying when one dies—SD cards now.

Somewhat amusingly, I’ve also found a couple of things I like about them over CF cards as well. For starters, the lack of pins means I’m much less concerned about bending pins in my camera’s card slot or card reader. It’s never happened to me in the past, but it’s always been a concern in the bag of my mind. I’m also increasingly becoming a fan of the push-in-and-it-pops-out release mechanism.

Going forward, the next apparent card format XQD, adopts some of the perks I like from SD and combines it with a bit bigger card and faster performance form CF. That said, it looks like it’s going to be a long slow transition to XQD, if it happens at all. As it stands, only the Nikon D4 supports it and Lexar and SanDisk waited until well after the D4 was released to announce they would begin making XQD cards. All told, it’s been more widely adopted than CFast was, but 1 camera still isn’t much of a market.

In the end, what I think I’m trying to say, at least to the guys like me who’ve always shied away from SD cards, is they aren’t all that bad.