SDXC Cards in your EOS 7D

Hello guys, do you hate the costly prices of CF cards? Do you want to get a lot more storage and speed with the new SDXC cards? Worry no more! Today's post is a camera hack, I will help you use your SDXC card on your Canon EOS 7D, 5D, 1D, or other similar cameras!

Disclaimer: You follow these tips and instructions at your own risk! The author of the blog is not responsible for any damages that may result from these instructions. These tips and instructions are provided for educational and informative purposes only.  

First of all here are the three things you will need:

1. A Canon EOS 7D, 5D, 1D, or other similar camera.
2. A CF to SD adapter. (I recommend this one, it is also the one I'm showing in the image above.)
3. A SDXC Card. (The one in the picture above is the Lexar Professional 64GB SDXC.)

Alright now, first of all, insert the SDXC card into your adapter then put it into your camera. Right now, it will tell you the card needs to be reformatted in order to be used. I know the SD card website tells you not to do it, but do it anyways. This will format your SDXC card into FAT32 file system. The original file system is exFAT. So you might be wondering if this is safe right? See the following reasons:

1. Your write and read speed is untouched.
2. Same amount of storage (as for me 64GB).
3. Only difference now is you will be limited to 4GB per file (This is a filesystem limit, can't be fixed.). Photos you take will never be that big, don't worry.
4. You can always format it back into exFAT on a computer if you ever need to store something over 4GB on it.

There you go, after you format the card, your camera should read it. You have a very large storage on your camera now! Hope you enjoy it. Also some reviews for the products I've shown above.

The adapter I'm using, I think is the best, but this is the first one I've bought. I would recommend it. Unlike other adapters I saw online, this one has no speed issues, and is compatible with SDXC cards. Which is great. On my EOS 7D, I had no problems with shooting videos or taking RAWs with this one. It works as if I had a real CF card in there. Only one complaint as with all adapters like this, you have to take the adapter out of your camera first, before you can take out the SD card. Doesn't affect the quality though. The other thing I noticed after using it a bit (I tried to do some high speed photography), after 10 shots, I took out the adapter and it felt warm to the touch, but no speed problem. So I'm guessing there could be a small chance with over heating, but  I would still recommend it if you plan on having a back up flash memory.

Now for the Lexar Professional 64GB SDXC, I have already tested this thing out on my camera. I can take over 1000 RAW + JPEG (High Quality) photos on my camera! No problem. Also the write and read speed is amazing. If you always shoot in RAW, I would totally recommend this.

Of course I do not use this adapter as my main storage. I also have an 8GB CF card, but with my RAW photo shooting, it will exhaust that memory card quick! So if you are like me who take a lot of photos, or do RAW, get these! It works great as a backup memory card and SD cards cost like 2/3 the price of CF cards and they work a lot faster.