Lately I’ve discovered that my Canon S3 IS supports the new SDHC cards. This news was exciting for me because when I bought this camera, the specifications showed that it supports SD only. Usually when it comes to SDHC compatability, a thumb rule is that if not specified otherwise, the device does not support SDHC.
Devices that have no support for SDHC can take SD cards upto 2GB. Some of them can take 4GB SD cards. Those 4GB SD cards are not SDHC, and since the SD standard doesn’t allow the file system to be over 2GB, they use some kind of a hack for this. It’s not acceptable for all devices so you’re taking a risk by buying a 4GB SD card.
As I was saying, the rumors came from well-known forums. They refer to the official US Canon website which added this specification only recently.
I’m still skeptic about it and wouldn’t believe until I am able to take a 16GB SDHC card, put it in my camera, shoot 16GB of pictures, and finally copy them all to a PC to verify the data.
Recently 8GB SDHC cards have become very cheap, as well as 16GB SDHC. As for myself, I wouldn’t be happy with SD cards until they will be available in 64GB or 128GB SDHC. This will probably happen by the end of 2009.
I’m trying to get my hands on one of these SDHC cards to test my camera so I’ll update soon. Read the full article to see updates.
1st Update: Supports Sandisk 4GB micro SDHC using an adapter. This is a class 2 card. I had no problem shooting photographs and video clips using the Canon S3 IS camera.
2nd Update: Supports Sandisk 8GB micro SDHC using an adapter. This is a class 4 card. I had no problem shooting photographs with this card as well.