Here's one of the smallest forms of flash memory yet! The xD-Picture Card works like other flash memory cards to store pictures, music, and other types of data with a range of compatible devices (digital cameras and camcorders, portable Internet audio players, and more), yet it's tiny -- roughly thumbnail-sized. Warranty: 1 year.
The Olympus xD-Picture Card is compact for smaller and more stylish digital devices. It's powerful for amazing memory capacity now, and increased memory capacity in the future. It's durable, making it a media you can trust with your most valuable data. And it's versatile, for unprecedented device flexibility. Olympus xD-Picture Cards--the most advanced digital media cards ever for the best digital images yet. Nothing's impossible.
Quickly and easily transferring images and data to a computer is a cinch when the Olympus xD-Picture Card is used with any xD-compatible product. And it's just as easy using non-xD devices as well, thanks to a number of groundbreaking adapters that will be available, including a CompactFlash Adapter, SmartMedia USB Reader/Writer, and PCMCIA/PC Card Adapter.
Designed with the most advanced storage technology available, the Olympus xD-Picture Card system meets the memory capacity needs of today, while also being readily available to fulfill the increased memory capacity needs of tomorrow.
Olympus xD-Picture Cards are the only xD cards that support the Panorama function found on most Olympus digital cameras.
1 Much Quicker performance than I had anticipated,,,
Having had some experience with 256M FlashCards, I was about to turn this card down & just buy a 128M card (adding another one if I needed more capacity), but the salesperson convinced me to take this one. While not as seamless & perfect as film cameras, I was pleasantly surprised by the ubwexpected speed of this card.
2 Does just what it was intended to do.
I have never used SD cards, so I cannot comment on their comparison. However, I can comment on my 256 XD Card. This card is awesome. I can take over 300 pictures without worrying about running out of space. It is an amazing upgrade from the card that comes with the camera. Bottom line is that this card does exactly what you need it to do. I have also not found it to be slow or unreliable. It works each time, every time, and fast.
3 About the same speed as my compact flash but not as reliable
I use this 256M Xd Olympus for my C5050. taking pictures is good and comparable to the 256M compact flash with about half of the price tag. Ater downloaded the pictures to my computer, the card went poopy!!(card error and cannot be able to reformated) I used the same Sandisk card reader as for my compact flash card! I used the other reader (computer built in), well I fried another 64M Xd fujifilm. Performance may be! but reliable, I don't think so. Giving a 2 is too generous !!!
4 slow! not in any way worth the premium price!
Check web resources. You will find that in all published timing
tests writes to xD cards are slower than writes to the best CF
cards despite xD cards costing 60% more. So forget about buying
xD cards because they are faster; they aren't.
I could find no independent verification that xD cards decrease
battery drain in a digital camera. Even if I were willing to
believe the claim, it is still far cheaper to purchase two or
three extra sets of rechargeable batteries and carry them with
me.
xD cards are a waste of money if your camera can accept CF cards.
5 Not a commodity if you shoot in Panorama Mode
Several reviewers have indicated xD memory is a commodity. Buyer beware: If you have an Olympus digital camera, and you shoot in the Panorama mode (which I use regularly and really like when snowboarding and backpacking), you HAVE TO HAVE AN OLYMPUS BRANDED xD CARD; non-Olympus cards don't support and won't enter the mode
6 commodity product; buy where you want
I bought this item from the local office supply store. Costco has it cheaper and has a better return policy (and is 5 min. from my house). Buy this where it makes sense.
7 Beware xD memory...
Thank heavens analogue cameras standardised on 35mm. Just imagine you went into a shop and had a choice of 2inch, 30mm, 25mm, 33mm, 35mm etc films, only one of which would fit your camera. Olympus have done a Sony and repackaged the same old memory chips (e.g. SD, MMC, SM, CF, MD) as xD and decided to sell it at twice the price of SD memory. Once you buy one of their (admittedly good) digital cameras the small xD market will force you to buy expensive memory that is incompatible with almost everything else our there. As I already own some cheap standard SD memory that's not usable in most Olympus cameras, I have had to look elsewhere for a camera :o(
8 Great Card!!
This is a great card if you want to shoot video or shoot high mb photos. Unfortunately for Amazon, its less than $80 at Costco.
9 Enough of confusing standards and formats
I wish the electronics manufacturers don't take consumers for granted. Every year, they come with new storage cards and drive formats. That is the reason many like me are not happy to buya a new electronic device. How can you improve the economy if you don't standardise these sort of things and give the confidence to the consumer that what he/she buys will stay productive and useful at least for two to three years? Remember it is the middle class common man who forms the largest consumer base. We just got over a few years ago from Betamax and VHS formats. Now we have competing DVD formats making most of us totally confused and preventing us from buying any of the multiformat DVD writers even! Until these sort of the incompatabilities are not sorted by all the manufacturers together, they are bound to loose their investment and have poor returns.
10 excellent and reliable
I bought this card for my olympus 300 digital camera just before leaving the US for 2 weeks in Europe. I used the card daily, taking at least 50 pictures at high resolution a day. One day I actually shot over 200 pictures. It worked flawlessly every time.
11 Tiny and promising, but do we really need it?
Measuring at an incredibly small 0.8 x 1.0 x 0.07 inches, xD picture cards are a new flash storage format jointly developed by Fuji and Olympus, the two largest manufacturers of digital cameras in the world, as a futuristic successor to the SmartMedia card. The xD cards are actually manufactured by Toshiba, known for its promotion of the competing Secure Digital (SD) flash storage format, and are about 1/3 the size of a SmartMedia card and slightly smaller than SD and MMC cards. (Confused by the alphabet soup yet?)
Sidebar: xD stands for "extreme digital"
But smallness does not mean lameness. Fuji and Olympus promise very high read/write speeds (3MB/sec for writes and 5MB/sec for reads) as well as lower power consumption for the xD cards. They also claim that eventually xD's capacity will reach 8GB (!!!), although no timetable has been set. Right now xD cards come in 32MB, 64MB, 128MB and 256MB flavors, and generally cost 50% more than same-capacity SD cards, but their prices are likely to drop quickly as more digital cameras accept the format.
Which brings us to the critical question, how many digital cameras accept xD cards? Not many at this point, and digital cameras that accept SmartMedia cannot use xD. But given the market clout of Olympus and Fuji, we'll surely see more xD-friendly models soon. The question is whether other camera producers (Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Toshiba...) will also adopt the technology. My prediction is since Canon has made a commitment to continued use of CompactFlash, they are unlikely to go with the xD. Toshiba manufactures xD cards for Fuji and Olympus, so they may adopt it if they see serious commitment by the latter two.
Since so far few cameras use the xD format, there is little real-world comparison between xD and competing formats such as SD and Sony's MemoryStick/MemoryStick PRO. Whether you'll need xD is entirely dependent on whether the digital camera you choose will accept it. My advice is pick a digital camera without regard to the storage format it takes, because all the formats out there -- SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, and now xD -- get the job done.
