In 2001, Toshiba’s attempt to replace floppy disks, called SmartMedia, was found in about half of all digital cameras and dominated the market for use in those devices. But as other manufacturers began creating cards with faster data transfer and much more storage than the SmartMedia max of 128 Megs, the SD card began edging it and MultiMedia cards out of use. Then two digital camera producers teamed up and opted to make their own media cards. Olympus and Fuji, who had once endorsed SmartMedia as the card best for use in their cameras, created the xD picture card just for digital cameras.
The xD Picture Card (with the xD short for eXtreme Digital) was released in 2002, the year of vast overuse in the media of the word “extreme.” Extreme sports, extreme soft drinks, extreme snack sensations. . . the word was everywhere, so why not extreme digital storage that makes the act of taking pictures with your digital camera an extreme photo opportunity? The name was meant to make it sound more hip, more now and a bit more radical than other memory cards. Fujifilm and Olympus began advertising their xD as the storage of choice for their cameras. Kodak eventually got on board, with xD cards available in their cameras today.
xD cards are available in storage sizes from 16 Megs (small even by SmartMedia standards) all the way up to 1 GB, with growing technology sure to expand that top limit eventually. Write speeds range from just over a second for the small storage cards to write, and about 5 seconds to reads. Larger cards generally write 3 Megs and read 5 Megs per second. The largest xD card, though, a type M with an entire gigabyte of storage writes two-and-a-half Megs per second, and can read 4 Megs a second. These cards are a far cry from the digital camera storage leader of 2001, SmartMedia cards, whose top storage was usually no more than 32 Megs in devices out of the box, and required firmware upgrades to hit the limit of 128 Megs. It’s believed that the type M xD cards will expand soon, maybe even up to 8 gigs of memory. But older devices can’t benefit from the larger cards as they’re not compatible.
Unfortunately for the xD, the SD card which is now a standard companion to not just digital cameras but almost every kind of digital device imaginable, is a better choice and has become the memory card most commonly in use. While xD cards can only be developed and improved upon by its creators, SD is open format, so anyone with the means and know-how can work on making the format better.
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