The new Smart Media?

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02073001olympusxd.asp

Looks like Oly has been working on some new memory cards with Toshiba.

Hope this means some new cameras are coming out this fall as well. I'm still waiting to see what Oly has up their sleeve If not, maybe an E-10 will be mine this fall as well.

Dwight1973 said:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02073001olympusxd.asp

Looks like Oly has been working on some new memory cards with Toshiba.
Hope this means some new cameras are coming out this fall as well.
I'm still waiting to see what Oly has up their sleeve If not,
maybe an E-10 will be mine this fall as well.

Click to expand...

I am a little shocked that there is going to be yet another format of card out there. I would think that if they are going to create something new, it would have to be truly groundbreaking, which it looks like it is not. It is going to be hard to convince manufacturers of digital output machines and the like to support yet another format. If this keeps up, we may see a 15 in 1 card reader!
Steve C.--

Proudly shooting with an Olympus c4040

I read the press release and think the new card is pretty
good technology. I don't have time to discuss this thoroughly
but 1) it is the smallest media, 2) it is faster and simpler than
the new mmcards--no controller chip, 3) it can have huge capacities--
up to 8 gigb (wow!), 4) it is compatible with compact flash cameras
(wow!), 5) smartmedia is a dead format going forward in new
devices. Why shouldn't a company like Olympus innovate and
introduce its own technology? If they can design and make
something better, they should. Otherwise we would still be listening to
8-tracks. This appears to be well thought out--and they made it
compatible with compact flash devices--this is a great idea, and
the first attempt I think at trying to make compatibility going forward
part of the process. If Phil argues that all cameras should simply adopt
compact flash, I think he would be limiting the uses of memory media.
This card is 1/3 the size of a compact flash, and uses less power.
This makes the media useful in many types of gadgets and
especially smaller ones. I don't mean to rant--but after reading
the press releases, this seems like a well thought out and useful
innovation/technology and this should be encouraged. If the
card does what Fuji says it will do--what advantages are there to any
other media going forward? I'm not that technical, but I do not
see how this would not be the best designed media so far in terms
of its usefulness.

Colquhoun said:

Dwight1973 said:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02073001olympusxd.asp

Looks like Oly has been working on some new memory cards with Toshiba.
Hope this means some new cameras are coming out this fall as well.
I'm still waiting to see what Oly has up their sleeve If not,
maybe an E-10 will be mine this fall as well.

Click to expand...

I am a little shocked that there is going to be yet another format
of card out there. I would think that if they are going to create
something new, it would have to be truly groundbreaking, which it
looks like it is not. It is going to be hard to convince
manufacturers of digital output machines and the like to support
yet another format. If this keeps up, we may see a 15 in 1 card
reader!
Steve C.--

Proudly shooting with an Olympus c4040

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110

dndjennings said:

after reading
the press releases, this seems like a well thought out and useful
innovation/technology

Click to expand...

Press releases are usually positive about the product they're promoting, don't read too much into that.

We don't need another card format, that's just recarving the rut they're stuck in. We need (want) cameras with masses of lag-less internal (RAM) storage and lightning-fast (wireless) transfer speeds.

P.S. "going forward"? What does that mean, exactly?

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8, QuickTime 5 Pro.

So I guess I am in the clear minority here, but I stand
by my comments. Just because the card is small does not mean
it will not be used in any size camera--so Steve's comments make
little practical sense as a criticism of the card--it is a criticism of
cameras. Again I ask (am I missing something?) is not this the
most flexible and useful card designed to this point? How do we
know we might not need this card in the future? Isn't the
criticism at this point a little short sighted? I have both
smartmedia cards and compactflash cards, so I can't be
excited about a new card right now either, but this does
seem to be a very good design.

I meant that since it is limited to 128 mb, that it is
unlikely that new cameras will be designed for it.

BugHunta said:

dndjennings said:

after reading
the press releases, this seems like a well thought out and useful
innovation/technology

Click to expand...

Press releases are usually positive about the product they're
promoting, don't read too much into that.

We don't need another card format, that's just recarving the rut
they're stuck in. We need (want) cameras with masses of lag-less
internal (RAM) storage and lightning-fast (wireless) transfer
speeds.

P.S. "going forward"? What does that mean, exactly?

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8,
QuickTime 5 Pro.

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110

Well my thinking is that Toshiba is making some crazy decisions. That is because their latest and greatest laptops come with built-in SD and SM readers. So they opt for XD and suddenly your state-of-the-art laptop sucks! I have bought Toshiba laptops (3 of them) and have been pleased with them. But my latest laptop upgrade was for a Dell 8200. And the reason was I felt that Toshiba is having a time gettng their "stuff" together. That was a sidebar But memory standardization on digicam's would be nice (excluding Sony, because they always do their own thing), but it seems that its a marketing ploy to lock us into a brand by virtue of the memory used. Honestly, do they really think consumer's are that stupid.....

Ciao....Barry

--
Ciao...Barry

OK, it's a good design, compared to yesterday's technology, but I'm as excited as I would be about a 2" 250MB floppy disk format.

They seem to be looking at memory cards as some sort of parallel to film cartridges: i.e. pop in a clean one, fill it up, produce the photos and store it somewhere. I would venture that noone approaches digital photography that way.

You don't need removable storage, you need reusable.

How idiotic is it that we should fill the card up, take it out of the camera, put it in a reader, download the pictures for long-term storage, put it back in the camera and wipe it? The only reason we do this is because transfer rates are still too slow. Crack that nut and you can keep the storage in the camera. (I know you can do this now, but it's too slow).

I want to be able to take a load of photos and either transfer them instantly to my PC, or upload them to my webspace on the move, so I can clear the camera's storage for a new session.

Is that too much to ask? Is it?
While there is a better profit margin in consumables, sadly, yes.

How long does it take to format an 8GB card, anyway?

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8, QuickTime 5 Pro.

That's a good point. One interesting thing in the diagram is the adapter for compactflash cameras. Looks like all you would need is an adapter and you could use these cards as well. Compactflash is already available in big sizes, so I don't see much of a point to that, though.

Colquhoun said:

I am a little shocked that there is going to be yet another format
of card out there. I would think that if they are going to create
something new, it would have to be truly groundbreaking, which it
looks like it is not. It is going to be hard to convince
manufacturers of digital output machines and the like to support
yet another format. If this keeps up, we may see a 15 in 1 card
reader!
Steve C.--

Proudly shooting with an Olympus c4040

Click to expand...

dndjennings said:

So I guess I am in the clear minority here, but I stand
by my comments. Just because the card is small does not mean
it will not be used in any size camera--so Steve's comments make
little practical sense as a criticism of the card--it is a
criticism of
cameras. Again I ask (am I missing something?) is not this the
most flexible and useful card designed to this point? How do we
know we might not need this card in the future? Isn't the
criticism at this point a little short sighted? I have both
smartmedia cards and compactflash cards, so I can't be
excited about a new card right now either, but this does
seem to be a very good design.

Click to expand...

True, it may be a good design (smaller, faster) but my gripe is that it is a different format that many existing readers/machines already in use are overloaded with different types of media. Betamax, after all, offered a better picture quality...it just was a different format that was not accepted. I guess you are right, my criticism is NOT with the card. But since we have to live with the current setup, another hat in the ring is just going to mess it up. At least for the short term, anyway....if this technology is really as great as they tout it to be, is expandable for years to come, and (most importantly) becomes more of an industry standard, then I am all for it!
C.
--

Proudly shooting with an Olympus c4040

Yep, another kind of memory, which means you will be stuck with cameras that only use this media or multiple cameras with multiple types of memory. They do have a compactflash adapter, so I guess if you have a camera that uses compactflash you can use these.

I was hoping Oly would just make their new cameras able to use compactflash and be done with it.

Barry Carter said:

Well my thinking is that Toshiba is making some crazy decisions.
That is because their latest and greatest laptops come with
built-in SD and SM readers. So they opt for XD and suddenly your
state-of-the-art laptop sucks! I have bought Toshiba laptops (3 of
them) and have been pleased with them. But my latest laptop
upgrade was for a Dell 8200. And the reason was I felt that
Toshiba is having a time gettng their "stuff" together. That was a
sidebar But memory standardization on digicam's would be nice
(excluding Sony, because they always do their own thing), but it
seems that its a marketing ploy to lock us into a brand by virtue
of the memory used. Honestly, do they really think consumer's are
that stupid.....

Ciao....Barry

--
Ciao...Barry

Click to expand...

That idea sounds like a good one, but I think we are still a long way from it happening. It would be nice, though. Heck, most people are still using a phone line to connect to the internet

BugHunta said:

OK, it's a good design, compared to yesterday's technology, but I'm
as excited as I would be about a 2" 250MB floppy disk format.

They seem to be looking at memory cards as some sort of parallel to
film cartridges: i.e. pop in a clean one, fill it up, produce the
photos and store it somewhere. I would venture that noone
approaches digital photography that way.

You don't need removable storage, you need reusable.

How idiotic is it that we should fill the card up, take it out of
the camera, put it in a reader, download the pictures for long-term
storage, put it back in the camera and wipe it? The only reason we
do this is because transfer rates are still too slow. Crack that
nut and you can keep the storage in the camera. (I know you can do
this now, but it's too slow).

I want to be able to take a load of photos and either transfer them
instantly to my PC, or upload them to my webspace on the move, so I
can clear the camera's storage for a new session.

Is that too much to ask? Is it?
While there is a better profit margin in consumables, sadly, yes.

How long does it take to format an 8GB card, anyway?

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8,
QuickTime 5 Pro.

Click to expand...

Well, if you are in the minority, I'm going to join in with you. This is merely another logical step in the speed-of-light progress of technology.

No, it isn't groundbreaking, but it probably does offer some advantages not found in other flash memory media formats - capacity, speed, cost, physical size. In our group, here, we view this from a very narrow perspective, digital still imaging. Because of that it's easy to forget about PDAs, MP3 players and so forth, that have a much larger market than digital cameras. And what about solid state memory camcorders? It's going to take bigger memory cards than what's available now to allow these things to be practical and affordable and replace tape based models.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg.

Seems like a good idea to me.

Rick

dndjennings said:

So I guess I am in the clear minority here, but I stand
by my comments. Just because the card is small does not mean
it will not be used in any size camera--so Steve's comments make
little practical sense as a criticism of the card--it is a
criticism of
cameras. Again I ask (am I missing something?) is not this the
most flexible and useful card designed to this point? How do we
know we might not need this card in the future? Isn't the
criticism at this point a little short sighted? I have both
smartmedia cards and compactflash cards, so I can't be
excited about a new card right now either, but this does
seem to be a very good design.

Click to expand...

Dwight1973 said:

That idea sounds like a good one, but I think we are still a long
way from it happening.

Click to expand...

We're never going to get there if they keep putting time and effort into chasing this rainbow. It just looks like a wasted opportunity to me.

Making a "better" version of a compromise solution isn't progress.

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8, QuickTime 5 Pro.

I would be more for it if they could provide some sound reasons for it. The article said that it was faster. What do they mean? is is 1.2X faster than current SM or is it 5X faster than the fastest CF cards. If they can transfer data as fast as a consumer grade HD can write, then I'm all for it. If it's just marginal, then who cares?

I do consider smaller is better most of the time, but this baby is less than 1sq. in.. The SM cards right now are hard enough to hold on to. Here's some homework. Measure out a piece of paper 20mm X 25mm and see how really small that is.

Dwight1973 said:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02073001olympusxd.asp

Looks like Oly has been working on some new memory cards with Toshiba.
Hope this means some new cameras are coming out this fall as well.
I'm still waiting to see what Oly has up their sleeve If not,
maybe an E-10 will be mine this fall as well.

Click to expand...

Now that I'm using Compactflash -- and probably will be for some time -- I bought a PC Card adapter for my laptop. Now I just put the CF chip into my laptop's new CF slot, and it'll copy a card-full ( 192 MB ) of photos almost as fast as it will copy them around the hard disc.

Things could be better -- but I'm not complaining about this setup at all.

Maybe I'm missing something--but I would much rather be able to
use external media than rely on an internal hard drive or whatever.
What happens when the internal memory is maxed out? I'm
curious if this technology would be better than compactflash--
taking size out of the equation. I'm not enough of a techie
to even offer an educated guess. What I do know is that external
cards are very useful to me and my wife in transferring photos and
data between computers and laptops. I also know from experience
that I do not ever plan on plugging a camera into a computer
(remember sds?) it sucks power, and puts wear and tear on my
beloved digital photographic instrument. I believe external media is
a better, more useful design for cameras. Not necessarily for pda's
and mp3 however, although the ability to put external media into
a gadget is very useful. A pet peave of mine with pda's is that

they only come with 32 or 64 mb--that's ridiculous when the price is 500$ or so. I will not ever buy one until they actually function like a real
computer.

BugHunta said:

Dwight1973 said:

That idea sounds like a good one, but I think we are still a long
way from it happening.

Click to expand...

We're never going to get there if they keep putting time and effort
into chasing this rainbow. It just looks like a wasted opportunity
to me.

Making a "better" version of a compromise solution isn't progress.

--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8,
QuickTime 5 Pro.

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110

I think it is too much to ask that there be only one media--technology
is too young and there is too much money at stake. Money
is causing innovation here, so I sya that is good. By the time
some of us buy new cameras, a 256 mb xd card will probably cost
49$. So big deal! We will still be able to use the sm cards we use
for a long time in whatever Oly cameras we use. I remember when
a 128 sm card cost 200$--I bought one at Microcenter with rebate for
39$ over the holidays. Media in the future, and the capacity of
it as relates to its price will be ridiculously low--just look at computer
chips and hard drives. I suspect that media will become almost
an insignificant consideration when we buy and upgrade our cameras
2-5 years from now. Thes are my random musings. Having read
all the responses in this thread, I am more convinced that this
is good innovation. Another thing to consider is the amount of research
and development that went into this product--all which probably started
2 years or so ago. To argue that OLY should have pulled the plug
because it would be nice if all cameras used the same media is not
logical, nor would it be warranted. I just got out of a deposition, so
I am just kind of arguing for argument's sake--but I think I'm
essentially right on this one. At least I think there are better arguments
to support the argument that we as consumers should not be angry
at this innovation. It did strike me that it might be difficult to
pull these out of a camera--I have a tough time w/ sm cards sometimes.

dndjennings said:

Colquhoun said:

Dwight1973 said:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02073001olympusxd.asp

Looks like Oly has been working on some new memory cards with Toshiba.
Hope this means some new cameras are coming out this fall as well.
I'm still waiting to see what Oly has up their sleeve If not,
maybe an E-10 will be mine this fall as well.

Click to expand...

I am a little shocked that there is going to be yet another format
of card out there. I would think that if they are going to create
something new, it would have to be truly groundbreaking, which it
looks like it is not. It is going to be hard to convince
manufacturers of digital output machines and the like to support
yet another format. If this keeps up, we may see a 15 in 1 card
reader!
Steve C.--

Proudly shooting with an Olympus c4040

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110

dndjennings said:

Maybe I'm missing something--but I would much rather be able to
use external media than rely on an internal hard drive or whatever.
What happens when the internal memory is maxed out?

Click to expand...

The point I'm trying (not very well, admittedly) to make is that it's ridiculous to find ways of transferring photos to storage that needs to be physically removed and manually transferred to a PC for long term storage. Take out that physical step and you have a camera that can broadcast photos direct to your audience or to long term storage. The internal storage is reusable and temporal, so it does not become maxxed out in practice.

Imagine that the card is paper and the card reader is a scanner. A camera that prints photos that can be scanned into a PC would seem clumsy, but in effect it's the same solution as the memory card one. Building a better quality printer into the camera would be a technological advance, but it would be pointless.

This is the kind of thing I'd want in my next camera:
http://www.cray.com/news/0204/xfersystem.html

"a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per second" The technology is available, it's just slightly outside my price bracket (but I'm prepared to wait 6 months).
--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8, QuickTime 5 Pro.

You also would want a camera with a 10 gig buffer that would
shoot a burst of 100 frames/second at full 6mp resolution. I'm
willing to wait 6 months for that, also! lol My hope is that optics
are still the most important part of the equation, and that my
uzi will reward with acceptable photos for years to come. I hate
the thought that what I have will be obsolete. Given advances
in speed and cost of components, I still do not understand why
cameras do not have bigger buffers and faster burst modes--
like the 100rs (could use a bigger buffer). Seems like many
of the new cameras out now are actually dumbed down and
have less in the way of these features.

BugHunta said:

dndjennings said:

Maybe I'm missing something--but I would much rather be able to
use external media than rely on an internal hard drive or whatever.
What happens when the internal memory is maxed out?

Click to expand...

The point I'm trying (not very well, admittedly) to make is that
it's ridiculous to find ways of transferring photos to storage that
needs to be physically removed and manually transferred to a PC for
long term storage. Take out that physical step and you have a
camera that can broadcast photos direct to your audience or to long
term storage. The internal storage is reusable and temporal, so it
does not become maxxed out in practice.

Imagine that the card is paper and the card reader is a scanner. A
camera that prints photos that can be scanned into a PC would seem
clumsy, but in effect it's the same solution as the memory card
one. Building a better quality printer into the camera would be a
technological advance, but it would be pointless.

This is the kind of thing I'd want in my next camera:
http://www.cray.com/news/0204/xfersystem.html
"a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of
80 gigabytes per second" The technology is available, it's just
slightly outside my price bracket (but I'm prepared to wait 6
months).
--
BugHunta
C700UZ, Bilora Pro tripod, MicroGraphx PicturePublisher 8,
QuickTime 5 Pro.

Click to expand...

--
UZI,d40,s110