In the old days, you pretty much expected that when you got a new gadget or piece of software, that it would be painful, if not impossible to make it work with your old technology. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the opposite. New wireless networking hardware almost always works with what’s existing. The new version of USB works with the old. The new versions of software generally work with the old.

This is why I’m currently rather annoyed with the next generation of the SD flash memory cards called SDHC or Secure Digital High Capacity. I got a new Canon Rebel T2i digital camera for Christmas. To go with it I bought two Kingston 8gb SDHC cards from Amazon as they were on sale for about $15 a piece.

I popped my new cards in my camera and took a bunch of Christmas pictures. All went well until I tried to take the card and pop it into the built in card reader on my new Dell Dimension 9200 computer with a 19-in-1 TEAC media card reader. My pc started acting buggy and wouldn’t read the card.

I started trouble shooting, rebooted the computer, reseated the card, etc… all to no avail. I took the card and popped it into the built in card reader on my Dell 2405FPW monitor. Same result. I test other cards I have in both readers and they work fine. Time to turn to google.

The long story short is that the SDHC cards, while identical to SD cards physically, use a completely different format for reading and writing data and are NOT backwards compatible with SD card readers or devices not specifically programmed to recognize SDHC.

Who the hell does this anymore?? So now I’m miffed at Dell as they have no updated firmware for either the reader in my new PC nor the reader built into my monitor, I’m miffed at TEAC for not creating the firmware, and I’m miffed at whatever genius came up with the new SDHC standard and didn’t bother to let anyone know that it won’t work with legacy hardware.

Now I have had to by a new (THIRD!!) card reader just to read these cards and will now have an extra piece of basically unneeded hardware cluttering up my desk. Meh!

The good news is that I found the Kingston MobileLite G2 Card Reader for about $20 on amazon. You can drop in several different types of flash memory cards into it, pop it into a USB slot, and it will act like a thumb drive. Two devices in one, basically. The nice thing is that it also comes with an 8gb SDHC card for free. 

 **UPDATE: JawnyG found a  new firmware update for the built in card reader on the Dimension 9200. Still no hope for the 2405FPW monitor though. Thanks JawnyG!

Technorati Tags: 2405FPW, 9200, Canon T2i, Dell, SDHC, TEAC

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