Yup, Fuji, too. Both Olympus and Fuji make extensive use of the xD card format, which is their own little proprietary format they dreamed up between themselves. I think it's a horrible format - it's expensive, the version with the largest capacity (the "M" series goes up to 2GB - the rest top out at 1GB) is the slowest (!) and you don't get nearly as much capacity for your money as you do with other media. Basically, it's expensive, and you have little chance of using it in any other devices.
In the same vein, Sony has Memory Stick. It's proprietary, but at least Sony are attempting to keep the format up to date in terms of speed and capacity. The end result is a maze of Memory Sticks and Memory Stick Pros and Memory Stick Duos and Memory Stick Pro Duos and Memory Stick High Speed Pro Duos.
It's pricey and you're stuck with Sony, but it's still not quite as bad as xD. It's still bad, though.
The two other main (and more open) formats are CompactFlash and Secure Digital. They're both roughtly at the same level of development in speed and capacity, and basically offer the best price for any given capacity of flash media.
Of these, CompactFlash is more open - the CF association was formed as a nonprofit working group to specify a the storage format. If you wanted to build your own cards or compatible devices, you could download the spec for free and have at it.
SD is less open - it began life as a clique between Matsushita (a.k.a. Panasonic), Sandisk and Toshiba, but has grown to become accepted by more and more manufacturers. The main benefit over CompactFlash is size - SD cards are small to begin with, and there are size-reduced versions that just get crazy (Transflash/MicroSD is the size of a fingernail). However, because of the "Secure" part of "Secure Digital", there's a whole bunch of super-secret stuff that needs to be known in order to make cards and devices. You can't have the spec unless you join and sign NDAs and stuff.
There are a couple of final formats floating around out there, too.
MMC (MultiMedia Card) used to be somewhat popular, but has fallen out of favour with a lot of manufacturers. Still, it's pin-compatible with SD cards, so if the card physically fits, it will usually work.
SmartMedia is basically dead, plain and simple.
My last on-topic thought is that it's a sad reflection of the current state of affairs that multi-format card readers like Sandisk's 12-in-1 job even exist. In an ideal world, there would be one open format, and that would be it.
Not that that's a knock on Sandisk's multi readers - given the situation, these are a great way to be sure that you can deal with pretty much anything that comes your way. I have one myself.
Anyway, getting back to Sony (and getting well off-track now - you can leave if you want!
), historically Sony has been one of the worst companies for proprietary media, and they've been pretty much slapped down hard each time:
- They were on the losing side of VHS vs. Beta
- Minidisc and the associated ATRAC audio codec never really made huge inroads to the audio market the way CDs did,
- They came up with that horrible UMD disc for their Playstation Portable that they've announced they're going to drop where movies are concerned
- No other manufacturer makes devices that use Memory Stick.
On top of that, they're one of the main backers of Blu-Ray for the next generation of video discs. If that ain't the kiss of death, I don't know what is.
One of the funniest things I've seen in quite some time was when Sony launched their new digital SLR, the Alpha. The camera itself uses CompactFlash - there's no way it would be taken seriously if it only took Memory Stick. However, clinging to their format as desparately as possible, Sony ships a little CompactFlash->Memory Stick adaptor in the box with each camera.
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/s...iew/index.shtml
That little adaptor would have cost them a fair number of Engineering man-hours to get right, and all so they can hopefully persuade a couple of people to use Memory Sticks in their dSLR.
difference in MEDIA CARD and SD card
Re: difference in MEDIA CARD and SD card
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