If you’re looking to buy a digital camera, you’ll be faced with a raft of decisions regarding features, resolution, price, and more. But there’s one factor in choosing a digital camera that often gets overlooked: the storage media format. Flash memory media has become popular for storing digital images. If you’ve used a digital camera you probably think nothing of popping a tiny card in and out of a camera instead of a roll of film.
But there’s a war on out there. It’s the battle of the media formats. We’ve seen this before, you’ll remember: Beta vs. VHS, cassette vs. 8-track, SyQuest vs. Zip. You may have been a casualty of one or more of these skirmishes. Me, I’ve got a refrigerator box full of useless Beta videotapes to show for it. If you’ve ever been on the losing side of a format war you’ll appreciate the need to discern the winning technology early. Failure to do so could leave you holding an expensive collection of antiques.
Battle Stations
Unlike the historical battles I just cited, the war of flash memory media involves more than just two armies. Up until recently the primary clash, however, has been between the SmartMedia (SM) and CompactFlash (CF) formats. SmartMedia (a trademark of Samsung Corp.) is a thin wafer, approximately one-and-a-half inches square, while the CompactFlash (introduced by SanDisk, but the trademark is controlled by the non-profit CompactFlash Association) card is several times thicker and almost identical in length and width. Both formats are common among consumer and “prosumer” digital cameras on the market today.
When shopping for a megapixel camera you’ll find that they all support one or the other of these formats. (The Olympus C-2500L is the only camera currently on the market that has both SM and CF slots.) It is perfectly possible to find an excellent camera supporting either format. There are presently about 30 megapixel models on the market from vendors such as Agfa, Ricoh, and Toshiba, which employ SmartMedia. This market segment, however, is dominated by Olympus — with 12 camera models as of this writing — and FujiFilm — with 7 — who together account for 65 percent of the SmartMedia camera market.
Not a Smart Bet
While these are reputable companies with excellent products they won’t be able to save the SmartMedia format from the rush to CompactFlash that is already digging SmartMedia’s grave. Even today there are 60 percent more megapixel cameras that support CompactFlash than there are supporting SmartMedia. Twelve companies-including Kodak, Nikon, Canon, and Epson — offer CF megapixel cameras, compared to SmartMedia’s seven. Even among the seven, Agfa and Olympus have hedged their bets with the introduction of CF-supporting cameras.
SmartMedia once had a cost advantage over CompactFlash because the latter carries a controller chip onboard, adding to its production costs. Increased demand for CompactFlash has brought prices down recently, thus eroding the SmartMedia cost advantage. SmartMedia, available from a handful of sources (such as Lexar Media, and SanDisk), currently averages $3 to $6 per megabyte. CompactFlash averages just $2 to $5 per megabyte.
There are several reasons for this cost shift. An onboard controller allows CF cards to avoid compatibility issues with older hardware as CF technology adapts to newer products. Each time you purchase CF media you get an up-to-date controller capable of communicating with all the latest cameras (and other devices). By contrast, SmartMedia contains only a memory chip, and currently tops out at 64 MB.
CompactFlash’s thicker architecture also allows for greater storage capacities than the SmartMedia “wafer” can handle. Lexar Media — just one of a dozen CF media vendors — currently offers a 160-MB CF card, with a 256-MB card due by summer, and a 500-MB card expected by year’s end. As capacities increase, the cost of the onboard controller is amortized, becoming less relevant to the overall manufacturing cost. CompactFlash is also faster than SmartMedia.
CompactFlash has a durability advantage over SmartMedia, as well. While both are solid-state flash memory media, the contacts are exposed over nearly half of the SmartMedia card’s underside, where fingerprints and other foreign flotsam can damage or corrode them. The cards are also more flexible and can be snapped in two with bare hands.
The Same, Yet Different
Even when you’ve reached the supposed security of the CF camp, you’ll still need to consider differences among CF media when choosing your camera and peripherals. Just as successive generations of CD-ROM drives got progressively faster — touting speeds of 4x, 16x, 64 x, ad infinitum — so, too, are there various speeds of CF media. The initial sustained transfer rate (speed) of CF was 150 KB per second.
Lexar Media, which holds some 50 patents on CF technology, makes the most of the company’s proprietary accelerated CF media, offering 4x, 8x, and 10x versions. (A patent infringement suit brought by SanDisk against Lexar Media goes to trial in October of this year.) According to Lexar, its CF media is faster than any other CF media on the market. You’ll notice speed differences in camera recovery time between pictures, as well as when downloading images to your computer or printer.
Lexar has also upped the ante with unique “USB-enabled” CF media that can be read as an external hard drive when inserted into a Lexar JumpShot CompactFlash reader (bundled with Lexar CF media) attached to a USB port. Correspondingly, Lexar’s CF media is slightly more expensive than competitors’, but it conveys obvious advantages.
It Ain’t Over
But just when you thought it was safe to assume that CompactFlash had emerged victorious, along comes Sony with yet another, proprietary flash memory format for digital cameras. Using its huge marketing muscle and ubiquity in the home electronics and entertainment markets, Sony is advertising its “stick-of-gum-sized” Memory Stick as the next sure thing, not only for cameras, but all of your home appliances with memory needs.
Currently priced similarly to CF media, Sony Memory Sticks offer a maximum storage capacity of 64MB and can only be used in specific Sony cameras. Rumors have it that Sony will eventually introduce a 1-gigabyte Memory Stick, but not for over a year. By then, of course, all bets are off as to the capacities of other media formats.
Supporters of the Memory Stick claim that the matchbook-size CF cards are just “too big” for the shrinking cell phones, palm-sized computers, and MP3 players of the near future. (Which begs the question: Are these devices just getting too darned small to use?) There is also an implied advantage to the Memory Stick if your house is brimming with other Sony appliances, but how such interchangeability might be useful is still subject to speculation.
It might be tempting to dismiss Sony’s Johnny-come-lately venture as sour grapes — another industry giant trying to take control of the market with a proprietary media format. But the recent announcement of a partnering agreement with Lexar Media, whereby Lexar will manufacture accelerated Memory Sticks, greatly enhances the viability of the fledgling format. Apparently learning from the failure of its closely held BetaMax video standard, Sony has already licensed nearly 50 companies to employ Memory Stick technology. New product announcements are said to be imminent.
Parting Gifts
Just in case you were wondering, there are some also-rans out there, as well. The newest of these is Iomega’s Clik! disk. It is essential a tiny 40-MB hard disk that can be inserted into any number of peripheral orifices (available from Iomega) to exchange data among CF, SM, PC card, and hard drive media. Currently Agfa is the only company to offer a Clik!-enabled camera. The portability and low cost (less than 50 cents per megabyte) of Clik! media is a handy interim solution, but I’m guessing that the days of rotating electromechanical storage devices are numbered, no matter how small. Solid state is here to stay.
You may remember the cute little cameras (to wit, Sony’s Mavica line) that accepted everyday floppy disks. Handy when the floppy was still the ubiquitous storage media standard, these cameras, while still available, are already anachronisms doomed by the floppy’s limited storage capacity and the demise of less-stable rotating media.
One other format that still has some mileage left is PC Card (ATA) flash memory. These high-capacity cards are still favored by the high-end professional photography market. A 512-MB PC Card is soon to be available. Still, the consumer and prosumer markets can safely ignore this standard. Even now CF has begun making inroads into high-end professional cameras. The handwriting is on the wall.
Bottom Line
While this market segment, like most, is in a constant state of flux and today’s trends are often yesterday’s news in an eye-blink, it’s safe to say that CompactFlash is the way to go for anyone navigating today’s megapixel camera market. Its capacities are set to go well beyond virtually any home and office needs for the foreseeable future, and its price point is well within affordability and getting cheaper. For a few extra cents per megabyte, Lexar CF media seems an obvious choice, with speedier performance and handy USB-connectivity. Whatever the future holds, you’ll most likely be trading up in a few years anyway, as the newest camera gadgets capture your imagination.
Read more by Marty Beaudet.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on May 19, 2000
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The author states that the CF media cards are better for a number of reasons including its capabilities to be conected via-USB, however he failed to mention that the smartmedia cards can be as well, via the smartmedia reader-writer by olympus. This product is available for under $60 and works fast and allows you to upload images back on to the media caed after editing the pics..