Old Digital Rebel (300D) Maximum CF Card Size

[BurnUnit]

I have an old Digital Rebel that works fine that I plan on giving to a friend who has shown an interest in stepping up from her phone camera. She was considering buying some sort of used DSLR at an online auction site, but I warned her of the possible risks involved. I figure this Rebel should work well enough to help her decide if she wants to dive in any deeper.

The camera works fine with an old Transcend 1GB CF card. But I thought she might want to buy a spare card. The user manual doesn't doesn't seem to list a maximum capacity, but I've got it in my head that a 16GB or larger card might give this camera a "brain freeze". The forums here show some old posts that list using 64GB to 128GB in a Digital Rebel but that just sounds downright crazy to me. Do the larger CF cards just have better backward compatibility with these older cameras by design? I don't want to tell her what to buy if it will give this old Rebel a seizure.

[rs-eos]

According the manual, RAW + M JPEG (not sure if camera can do RAW + L JPEG), that would be approx 128 images per gigabyte. Or 304 images per gigabyte if just doing L JPEG.

Thus, I estimate that a 16 GB card could capture around 2,000 images (RAW + M JPEG), or 4,800 images (L JPEG). So that should be more than enough space. Even an 8 GB card may be ample.

[BurnUnit]

Yeah. That's the same info I did find in the manual. But it makes no mention if there's a maximum card capacity that this camera can handle. A 4GB or 8GB CF card would be plenty large enough for the job. But can the camera properly utilize these larger capacity cards? No sense buying one if it makes the "obsolete" Digital Rebel flip its lid.

[BurnUnit]

From another source I found some info that the Rebel XT could safely use CF cards up to 4GB. There were also mentions that some users had used 32GB and 64GB cards in the XT seemingly with no ill effects. But when the card was formatted in the camera it would access only 4GB. I'm going to assume that this also applies to the Digital Rebel 300D and probably some of the other earlier Canon DSLRs as well.

[rs-eos]

Could be. Sounds like the camera's formatting logic is using 32-bit values (which max out at 4 GB).