The CompactFlash Association has announced a new 5.0 standard that will increase the addressing from 28 bits to 48, resulting in an explosive amount of storage gained. It means that the new format can hit 144-petabytes once flash technology catches up.

Also, photographers and videographers will be able take advantage of some new safeguards that guarantee a minimum level of performance while preventing dropped frames, especially in HD.

Today SanDisk has likely pleased at least a few more professionals in the digital photography and videography world with the introduction of the new 32GB Extreme III CF card. Not only have they doubled the capacity of the largest CompactFlash card SanDisk previously had available, but they’ve also bumped the read/write speed up from 20 MB/second to 30 MB/second with this new item.

Anyone that heavily uses memory cards for digital cameras or video cameras can appreciate how nice it is to have more storage in a single card, and upping the transfer rate by 50% makes the decision to get the larger 32GB CF card just that much easier. Sure you can generally get an SDHC card for a little less money and they are a little bit smaller, but the transfer rate is what will make a difference. The Kingston 32GB SDHC card for example can hold just as much, but moving the card’s entire capacity of data is the difference between about 18 minutes for the SanDisk CF and 2.2 hours for the Kingston SDHC.

Delkin has a new CompactFlash card reader they are showing off this week called the ImageRouter. This device solves the problem of photographers having to download multiple CF cards to a computer after a shoot. The ImageRouter doesn’t really make the actual transfer happen any faster but what it does do is allow the multiple cards to do their transfer simultaneously so you don’t have to watch it and swap them out when each are done.

As if loading 4 of the cards at a time is not enough Delkin says that if you buy more than one you can daisy-chain them together with two ImageRouters letting you download 8 CF cards at the same time. Delkin doesn’t elaborate on their site on just how many can be connected at a time but does say that you can connect “two or more” and also mentions that the ImageRouter will help whether you have “four or fourteen CompactFlash cards”. We’re guessing that after a few connected together things might get pretty slow and according to SlashGear three is the limit.

The card readers connect through a USB 2.0 connection and reach transfer speeds of 19MB/sec reads. Two ImageRouters connected slows it slightly with a 17MB/second read and 15MB/sec write speeds. Delkin is getting these card readers ready for purchase by April retailing at $149. The BackupandBurn software can be purchased with it in a bundle for $249, which helps with automatically routing and naming files during the transfer.