NikonWeb.com

Does anyone know where these memory cards may still be available? It's for a DS-505; I noted Nikon's web site had a faq question from 2003 that they were still making the EC-15, so it stands to reason there's a few out there.

Barring that, I know the 40MB "Solid State File" card from IBM is supposed to work, but does anyone know if some of the others from this same design will work? There's several 20MB and 10MB ones on Ebay that are part of the "Solid State File" line.

Lastly, I heard one pin has to be hot to tell the camera it's the "high speed" card. Had anyone ever tried to wire one of those PCMCIA adapter to work with a compact flash card?

Thanks for any help.

Hi,

Yes, there has to be a logical 'one' asserted on one of the pins to tell the camera there is a 'Hi Speed' card inserted.

Yes, at one time I had popped a couple covers off of newer flash cards and wired that up.

Problem is, I don't recall which pins I tied together to do that, and I no longer have any reference material for that style card. I did a big clean out some years back, and tossed a lot of obsolete spec sheets I figured I'd never have a use for again.

There was a point in time when these flash cards were really, really slow and some things wanted faster ones, so they were special - and quite costly. Later on, the slowest cards were faster than the older 'fast' ones, so there was no need to have a pin that differentiated and so one could no longer get ones from a factory with that pin 'asserted'.

That leads into the other problem. The e-series has a 128 MB memory address limit. Some of that address space is used for the hard-coded flash part that runs the camera. So, the storage card size is effectively limited to 96 MB. Larger ones will not work, even if you get one with the pin asserted....

Later!

Stan

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Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer