Price of Compact Flash Cards Continues to Drop

Posted on 31 December 2007

Declining memory prices are hardly headline news, but these prices are quite interesting: under $43 for 8GB CF cards and under $69 for 16GB (!) CF cards. (Does anyone know if I can even use a 16GB compactflash card in my 5D?)

Every so often someone opines that moving to a higher MP count camera doesn’t make sense, asking “how will you afford the memory to handle those giant files?” The answer is that the memory gets cheaper and cheaper all the time. Hard drive prices have dropped a lot recently, and 500GB drives are now regularly available for around $100. I haven’t done the math to prove it, but I have a hunch that the cost of storing one image from a 16MP DSLR is now probably less than what we paid to store a single image from a 4MP camera a few years ago.