The CompactFlash format, a popular format with professional photographers and SLR cameras is going to be superseded with a new flash card technology called CFast.  One significant drawback with CompactFlash is its 45MB/sec (300x) maximum interface speed, which makes it a bottleneck for high end digital cameras that take rapid continuous shooting, especially RAW images.  Manufacturers currently workaround this issue by using on-board RAM to cache the shots, but the other problem here is that once the cache has filled, the photographer needs to wait a moment for the cache to clear before taking further shots.

The CFast card overcomes this bottleneck by using a Serial ATA interface, giving a potential transfer rate of up to 375MB/sec (2500x).  By using sufficient speed flash with this interface, it potentially allows the manufacturer to do away with using on-board memory to cache rapid succession shots and store the photos directly to flash as they are being taken, thus cutting costs.  Another advantage is that it would be significantly improve read transfer rates, which is currently a very tedious process when dealing with large flash capacities, such as offloading a full 32GB CompactFlash card. 

CFast does have one significant drawback in that the interface is incompatible with CompactFlash, which means that a CFast card will not fit in a CompactFlash slot or vice versa.  Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association said that the specification is currently in its final stages and expects it to be published for distribution hopefully in April or May.  John Santoro, a senior product marketing manager for Lexar predicts that this format will arrive in 18 to 24 months, so it will be a few years before we start seeing the format becoming common in high end SLR cameras.  At present, these camera makers are reluctant to give info on any particular plans for the technology.

For now, it looks like CompactFlash has another couple of years to live as the dominant format for professional photography, since not all photographers are going to quickly give up their cameras just to get a model with CFast support.