MemoryStick Duo/
MemoryStick Pro Duo
USED IN: Sony products, including cell
phones and the foxy new PSP!
CURRENT MAXIMUM CAPACITY:
512MB ($105)/2GB High Speed Pro Duo
($450)
COST PER MEGABYTE (AT
MAXIMUM CAPACITY): $0.20/$0.23
High-Speed Pro
DURABILITY: Just as durable as the
full-size MemoryStick.
THE GOOD: Can be used in MemoryStick slots with an
adapter.
THE BAD: No significant advantages over more
standard formats, such as SD.
PROGNOSIS: Sony won’t let go of this one, so expect it
to be around a long time.xD
USED IN: Digital cameras—mainly
Olympus and Fujifilm
CURRENT MAXIMUM
CAPACITY: 1GB ($100)
COST PER MEGABYTE: $0.10
DURABILITY: Comparable to SD, but slightly smaller.
Designed to be handled.
THE GOOD: Relatively swift transfer rates in an itty-bitty
formfactor; can store “panoramic” photos on selected
Olympus camera models.
THE BAD: Limited adoption among digital camera
manufacturers.
PROGNOSIS: Fuji and Olympus wanted xD to become
the “it” standard for digital cameras. Alas, other cam
manufacturers shunned xD in favor of more open formats
such as SD and miniSD, so its longevity is far from assured.Several manufacturers have taken to describing the speed of their Compact-
Flash cards using the same rating system we’re familiar with from our optical
drives: 1x speed means the card can be written to at 150KB per second, 2x
means 300KB per second, all the way up to 80x, which is 12MB per second.
And these are write speeds, mind you; read speeds can exceed even these
figures. That’s downright dazzling for flash media, and a boon for photog-
raphers who can’t afford to miss a shot while waiting for their images to be
written to memory.
CompactFlash has been able to ratchet up the speeds beyond what most
other types of flash memory can accommodate because each unit contains
its own miniature IDE controller right on the card itself. As a result, it’s
possible to pack in faster memory cells and tweak the interface to wring outmore performance without requiring a
firmware update—or worse, a replace-
ment—to the CompactFlash-enabled
digital camera you already have.
Amazingly, you can achieve even
faster transfer rates than these, but
you’ll have to match the right camera
with the right card. For example, Lexar’s
Write Acceleration (WA) technology claims improved write speed perfor-
mance up to 23 percent, but in order to bag the extra speed, you’ll need a
camera that supports WA (which includes models from big cheeses Kodak,
Nikon, Pentax, and Olympus). nRS-MMC
USED IN: Cellphones
CURRENT MAXIMUM
CAPACITY: 512MB ($70)
COST PER MEGABYTE (AT
MAXIMUM CAPACITY): $0.14
DURABILITY: Fairly durable, but not designed
for frequent handling.
THE GOOD: Can be used in MMC/SD slots
with an adapter.
THE BAD: No improvements over MMC other
than its size.
PROGNOSIS: With mini- and microSD cards now
available, there’s little reason to adopt this format,
so it comes as no surprise that no one has.MA XIMUMPC JUNE 2005
MemoryStick/
MemoryStick Pro
USED IN: Sony products (digital
cameras, vidcams, laptops, et al )
CURRENT MAXIMUM CAPACITY:
512MB ($100), 4GB High-Speed Pro
($700)
COST PER MEGABYTE (AT
MAXIMUM CAPACITY):
$0.20/$0.08 High-Speed Pro
DURABILITY: Very durable—
rivals SD.
THE GOOD: Usable in the vast complement of Sony
consumer electronics; features write protection.
THE BAD: Very few products outside the Sony stable
use this format.
PROGNOSIS: Sony’s a tenacious company, so like it or
not, MemoryStick is here to stay.REMOVABLE MEDIA
Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic
Maximum PC sheds light on the mysteries of high-speed CompactFlash
Pulling 8GB of photos off your digital
camera requires either patience or a
high-speed CompactFlash card.