xD Picture Cards and Flash Memory
Flash memory card extreme
While the flash memory format war was warming up in the early part of the century, Fuji and Olympus jumped ship and created their own. There was a period when Toshiba's SmartMedia [SmartMedia] was the memory of choice in digital cameras. The MultiMedia Card [MultiMedia Card] was the underdog, but its technology was giving way to the SD card. A new form of memory came into play specifically for digital cameras.
xD Picture Card was a joint development between Fujifilm and Olympus specifically for digital cameras. xD stands for "extreme digital," a new, radical, in - your - face style memory card released in 2002 when extreme sports arrived to the winter Olympics and extreme was the marketing schlock of choice. You thought memory was for polite old data storage? According to Olympus and Fujifilm, Not xD! This portable storage format puts the FLASH back into flash memory. Use xD and it's a pure white knuckle adrenaline rush with every photo you shoot.
2001 was the heyday for the SmartMedia format of Toshiba. It controlled no less than 50% of the entire flash memory market at that time. It was the memory format of choice for two key players in the mainstream digital photography industry: Fujifilm and Olympus. Fujifilm and Olympus then decided develop their own format specifically designed for digital photography. Today, xD is found in Kodak, Fujifilm and Olympus digital cameras. The memory cards were originally only manufactured by Toshiba and Samsung. Today, you can also find xD made by Kodak, SanDisk and Lexar.
Read / write speeds
The sizes available for the xD Picture Card are 16MB, 32MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and 1GB. You can expect read/write speeds from 16MB and 32MB models to run around 1.3MB per second for a write and 5MB per second to read. 64MB, 128MB, 256MB and 512MB types will write at 3MB per second and read at 5MB per second. Lastly, the type M model,which is found in 1GB capacity, will write at 2.5MB per second and read at 4MB per second. The newer type M model is the latest development in the xD Picture Card format and should eventually be able to push cards up to 8Gig. The downside of type M is that it's not compatible with some older cameras that use the xD format.
The xD technology might not be so extreme after all. In fact, it's falling faster than a sky-boarder. There is no advantage to any device that uses xD over one using SD, which is xD's superior in every way. The relatively open format of SD means that innovations aren't necessarily only found by the format's master. The concept of open source where third parties are allowed to develop has been good for any platform in just about any technology. xD Picture is a completely closed format like Sony's Memory Stick.