Storage Wars

The various formats of storage media have been stable long enough that it's easy to forget that a war raged on this battlefront not long ago...

In the beginning, tape ruled the universe. Movies were stored on it, sound was stored on it, data was stored on it. 

Tape's biggest problem was that it was entirely linear. In the case of computer software, this meant that if the bit of data the program needed was at the other end of the tape, the tape drive had to spool back the entire reel to get to it. In the case of videocassettes, this meant that if the start of the movie was at the other end of the tape, the rental joint would charge you a buck and the clerk would think you were an ill-mannered savage.

To solve this problem, magnetic data migrated to spinning discs, which had the advantage of the read/record head being able to jump around from sector to sector like a hyperactive sand flea, rather than sitting still and waiting for the transport motors to bring it the bits it was looking for. The 3.5" Verbatim floppy in the photo above held 1.44MB of data compared to the 256kB of the Digital Data Pack cassette tapes on my Coleco Adam, and was loads faster.

It was sufficiently more compact and faster than cassette-type storage that some early digital cameras from Sony even used 3.5" floppies to store photos.

With Moore's Law roaring along at full speed, it took very little time for 1.44MB of data to go from "a lot" to "not very much at all" and the search was on for more capacity. CD-RW and Iomega Zip drives had their moments in the sun, but one of the weirder technologies around the turn of the Millennium was the SmartMedia card, one of which is at the top left in the photo.

Toshiba came up with SmartMedia, envisioning it as a straight-up replacement for 3.5" floppies. In fact, it was originally going to be called the SSFDC, or "Solid State Floppy Disc Card", which hardly rolls trippingly off the tongue, so you can see why it was changed. You could even buy a "FlashPath" caddy that was inserted in 3.5" floppy drives that allowed the computer to read the enclosed SmartMedia card with the right device driver installed.

While it was never a big hit in computers, SmartMedia enjoyed brief popularity in digital cameras, being used by both Fuji and Olympus in their early offerings.

Thing is, it was still fairly large, at least in terms of height and width, and cameras were shrinking. Further, camera resolution was growing faster than card capacity; in 2001 both Fuji and Olympus were selling cameras in the three-to-five megapixel range and the very biggest SmartMedia card was only 128MB. With a 5MP Olympus E-20, you'd only get about a dozen RAW files on a 128MB card.

So Fujifilm and Olympus came up with their own card format, the xD Picture card. The name stood for "eXtreme Digital", which was very on-brand for the year 2002AD.

The xD format was eventually expanded all the way up to include 1- and 2GB card sizes. They were fairly cheap because, like the SmartMedia they were replacing, they were completely dumb storage devices, with no on-board controller. Unfortunately, because they were completely dumb storage devices with no on-board controller, every time a new generation of bigger cards was released, the older cameras couldn't read them unless they received a firmware update. Friends, there is nothing the owner of a thousand-dollar-plus DSLR loves more than hooking their camera up to a computer, waving a chicken foot over the cable, and hoping they don't brick their baby by getting a step wrong or having an ill-timed blackout.

When Olympus put dual slots on their Four Thirds DSLRs, they acknowledged reality by making one of them a Compact Flash slot, like every other DSLR at the time was using, but the other was for their nearly-proprietary xD.

Olympus E-3 with slots for CF and xD

Fuji bailed on the format around 2008, joining the rest of the world in SD card land. Olympus, though, clung on like grim death for another couple years, during which it performed what may be the tackiest cynical corporate douche move in the history of tacky cynical corporate douche moves. 

When Oly released the E-420 and E-620, the penultimate all-new Four Thirds DSLR bodies ever, back in 2009, they added a special Panorama mode that would stitch together panoramic photographs in-camera...but only if an Olympus-brand card was in the  xD card slot. Not any ol' xD card, but an Oly-branded one. Considering these were just dumb cards, there was no reason for this except to move card inventory.

When Olympus released its final Four Thirds DSLR in 2010, the E-5, it was aimed at the professional market and, sensibly, it sported a CF slot and an SDHC slot, like pretty much every other pro DSLR on the market at the time. The day of xD was done. Nowadays unless you get used cards on eBay or occasional new-old-stock that pops up on Amazon, you're hosed for xD card availability.

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