Rant: Memory Card Formats

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the store to get a larger memory card for my camera. On my Vancouver trip, I forgot my extra cards and ended up having to delete pictures from the full card.

I ended up getting a 1 GB xD card. When I got home, I put it in the camera and discovered that my camera won’t recognize the card. Some googling found that my camera, an Olympus C-755, can’t handle the new 1 GB xD cards. How they could produce cameras for a relatively new format that couldn’t handle that size I don’t know.

Luckily, I was able to return it and get a 512 MB card. 512 MB seems to be the largest card that my camera will ever handle. And since xD is a proprietary format only used by Olympus and Fuji, it is likely that my next camera will use a different format. Also, the xD cards are twice as expensive as other formats. For the cost of the 1 GB xD card, I could have gotten a 2 GB SD card. The xD cards are also noticably slower than the SD card I use in my Treo.

I had run into a similar problem with my old Sony Clie SJ-30 and its Memory Stick. The early Memory Sticks were limited to 128 MB and that is the biggest size the Clie I gave to my brother will take.