Sony has decided to enter the CompactFlash market, an unusual move partly given the age of the format and its bulkiness in comparison to the latest memory cards but mostly because of Sony's penchant for its own design, Memory Stick.

Sony will pitch its CF products at the digital SLR camera market. Its motivation appears to be the CF format's storage capacity - up to 4GB, the company said, even as SDHC is already exceeding that. Indeed, Sony itself has launched an 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duo. Clearly, owners of digital SLRs prefer CF.

The company's giving away no details of its CF product line just yet - wait until their Spring introduction, it said. But we can expect cards of 1-4GB capacities with 66x and 133x transfer speeds, and they'll all be branded to associate them with Sony's Alpha 100 SLR camera. ®