For the professional, memory is more than sentimental; it is essential. And the portability of memory is as essential as its persistence. But how will you guarantee your portable digital memory—be it video or other "rich media" content—safe travels, and safe harbors wherever you take it? Sony believes Memory Stick is the answer, and if ubiquity counts for anything, they may be right.
April 2002|For six weeks we watched the sky and waited. Yes, we got other things done: we went to work, gathered materials, and made ready. But at the edge of everything, there was the want of snow. The snow did not fall to suit our schedule or to make our Christmas white. But when it did come, we set upon it like Whos on Roast Beast and built our sledding Mesopotamia on the hill, high above the hollow where the rivers meet.
John Ruskin said, "When we build, let us think that we build forever." But Ruskin was not making Mesopotamia out of snow. Because as inevitably as spring, our Mesopotamia melts and we turn our minds to other things until next year when the snow comes again. And though each year this scene plays out—watching, waiting, building, playing—each time it is new and the memory of last year's Mesopotamia fades with the snow.
Memories work like that. Without tending and occasional exposure to the light, they lose focus and clarity. Yes, there are the things we never forget, but after a time, the scene that plays in our heads begins to drop frames and grow choppy. Sometimes a trigger, like the smell of apple cider or the sound of a familiar tune, will set the mental scene in motion, but nothing brings it all back the way images do. I guess that is why we document our lives with pictures and home movies—because it allows us to take our memories out, dust them off, and keep them fresh in our minds.
For the professional, memory is more than sentimental; it is essential. The digital era has provided us with an unprecedented ability to document and share still and moving pictures and to store and re-purpose content in order to save and make money. Why not create training videos and serve them over the network whenever they are needed? Why not make those product demos available to potential buyers via the Internet? The opportunities created also necessitate a need to record, store, and distribute ever-larger amounts of data.
The paths that this digital era has forged are accessible to consumers and professionals alike and the demands of these groups are rapidly dovetailing. While professionals design, store, and deliver content on a larger scale, tools once limited to the pros have made their way into the hands of the masses. The big technology players know this and these days they strive to deliver solutions simultaneously to entry and enterprise-level customers. Sony is no stranger to this approach, as it is a name associated as readily with major motion pictures as TV sets, with broadcast cameras as home movie cameras. Now that the name of the game is digital, Sony has tried to stay ahead of the pack with each successive generation of digital devices and requisite memory solutions. And with its own favored contender among the mobile memory entries, the gumstick-sized Memory Stick, Sony believes they have found a fit to suit the entire portable storage spectrum.
Memory Past
With the first generation of digital cameras, Sony generated a great deal of excitement when the company introduced its FD Mavica, which could record directly to a floppy disk that users could pop out and play back in virtually any PC. However, at 1.5MB, there was not a whole lot of room for this to be more than a consumer application and certainly little opportunity for use in the video community. Then, a few years later, Sony built on the success of its first Digital Mavica by introducing a version that burned directly to an 8mm CD. The CD Mavica writes its images directly to 156MB (8cm) CD-R or CD-RW discs. This allows for storage of up to 160 pictures at 1600x1200 resolution. It also provides MPEG (MPEG HQ) modes MPEG-Video recording.
The latest craze in removable storage falls under the general heading of CompactFlash cards, which are solid state—meaning they contain no moving parts, which gives them less opportunity for failure—and provide users with much greater protection of their data than conventional magnetic disk drives. They are also small, approximately one-third the size of a PC card, and weigh about half an ounce. Another factor that distinguishes CompactFlash cards from other types other removable storage options is that they have their own controller on-board. Thus, cameras, PDAs, and other devices that use the cards are not burdened with the controller software.
SanDisk developed the CompactFlash standard in 1994. According to Mark Lewis, the company's director of retail marketing, the goal was "to produce a small, low-powered, removable, solid state storage device for portable products with the intention of replacing film, tape, and other media." CompactFlash consists of a small circuit board with Flash-memory chips and a dedicated controller chip, all encased in a rugged shell. Sony got into the flash memory game with its own device, Memory Stick, in 1998. It differs from CompactFlash in shape—it is rectangular while CompactFlash is square—and in pin connection. CompactFlash uses a 50-pin connector and Memory Stick employs a 10-pin connector. Currently, five types of media compete in the removable flash market: CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital Flash Card, Smart Media, and Sony's Memory Stick. SanDisk manufactures all of them. Lewis says they added Memory Stick to the fold last November because "it made sense from a competition standpoint." He also believes that, while there is room in the market for this many options now, that the ranks will thin and Memory Stick, along with CompactFlash and Secure Digital, will be around for the long haul.
While the various flavors of CompactFlash have found predominant use in digital cameras, Sony put the full heft of its marketing and manufacturing machine behind Memory Stick to diversify its application base. According to Sony, Memory Stick, unlike other flash memory cards, was designed with more than digital camera memory in mind. According to Michael Kahn, marketing manager for Sony's digital imaging products division, "Memory Stick originally came out of the digital imaging group in Japan. While the original concept was storage," he says, "we quickly saw beyond storing data and started looking at interlinking devices." Thus, Memory Stick aspires to be more than removable storage, but rather to be a universal media that allows users to record, transfer, and share various types of digital content, such as still and moving images, music, voice, and computer data and applications.
According to David Yang, public relations manager for Sony Electronics, over 200 companies are already supporting Memory Stick and 15 million Memory Stick products are on the market today in devices ranging from PDAs and printers to CD recorders and DVD players. "The Memory Stick format itself is a little under three years old," Yang points out, "and in that timeframe we've captured a 26 to 27 percent flash media market share."
Memory Stick and The Making Of Mesopotamia
Every year, after the first big snow, my husband and I shed any semblance of maturity, gather up the shovels, blow up the snow tubes, and build a sledding/ sliding/snowboarding course in the yard. We have come to call it sledding Mesopotamia because it is a creation of such elaborate proportions that, while lacking the cultural (much less archeological) significance of its namesake (being perhaps closer to the grave of civilization than the cradle), it has taken on a mythical quality rivaling the hanging gardens, if only to us.
This year, in our preparations, we also gathered up a pile of Memory Stick devices and decided to make a short documentary of Mesopotamia's planning, building, and shenanigans using only Memory Stick-equipped devices. (For the record, I'd like to state that, while I have three years experience building sledding Mesopotamia, I have absolutely no movie-making experience whatsoever.)
We began with Sony's PDA, the Clié, which operates under the Palm OS and provides more organizational functionality than even a plan-a-holic like me would ever need. The Memory Stick slot did allow for familiar removable-media storage and file transfer (especially handy because the Clié is also a digital audio player and music is a great enhancement for labor and play alike). But true to Sony's credo, it did more. The Memory Stick Slot and its 10-pin connector allow for add-on devices to "port" into the Clié. In this case, we could add on a little Get Smart-esque Memory Stick camera module to take medium- to low-resolution digital pictures. Then, we just swapped the camera for a Memory Stick, moved the files to the stick and transferred them to any other of the myriad Memory Stick-slot devices for manipulation or printing. (The Clié itself offers color display of both still and motion images.) When combined with wireless Internet access, this tiny add-on could provide any number of useful applications for location scouting, storyboarding, and the like.
Clié in pocket (loaded up with snow-play-inspiring tunes), we began to build. We shot stills using the Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-P5) and video using the Sony Mini DV Handycam (DCR-TRV30). Actually, both cams shoot still and video at resolutions from email quality-low to professional level-high. The video cameras did both motion and stills impressively, to my surprise. In the past, it had been regarded as gospel in digital photography circles that you needed separate still and video cameras because though they could do both, video cameras just didn't take very good stills and vice versa. The still camera, while it has the distinct advantage in size since it is smaller than my hand, couldn't compete with its three-times-bigger brother's video quality, but it also provided significantly higher resolution options than the video camera for stills.
Both cameras ship with low-capacity Memory Sticks. However, using the highest capacity 128MB Memory Stick, (sold separately for about $90) with the Cyber-shot in Memory Stick mode at the highest resolution (2048x1536, Fine) you can store 80 images. In HQ (high-quality) MPEG movie mode, the Cyber Shot will store about five minutes of video at 640x480 resolution. The Handycam will shoot stills at up to 1360x1020 and, at its Super Fine setting, will record 143 images to the 128MB stick. But that's not the cool part. That same 128MB stick, which in the "Making of Mesopotamia" project I never filled to capacity in a single session, could be swapped between both cameras while shooting. It could also be swapped to the Clié and used to print stills directly from Sony's Digital Photo Printer—all with no intermediary PC interaction. The Memory Stick generates its own file structure so that when the user is ready to access particular files, they are sifted into neat little folders for easy moving, manipulating, and managing.
Kahn envisions a "world of opportunity" that Memory Stick will enable. "Imagine," he says, "you are on remote location in a jungle somewhere. You are taking shots of a white Bengal tiger and you want to get that information to your editor in a studio in New York. You shoot with an MPEG movie mode-equipped camera. It allows you to go back, rewind the tape to the point you want to start your MPEG movie, and hit record. It will take the clip from the DV file and on-the-fly record it to memory stick. It captures that MPEG-1 coding, stores it on the Memory Stick." He continues, "Then it pops out, goes into a laptop, which has a wireless modem, and you can attach the file directly from the Memory Stick and email it to the editor in New York." The whole process, he says, would take about a minute and provide an editor with a valuable head start in developing the project.
While on a vastly different scale, in making Mesopotamia, I was impressed with the ease and interoperability of Memory Stick. Periodically, during the day while shooting, I transferred all of my files from Memory Stick to a Vaio laptop, which recognizes it as "removable media." On the Vaio, I chose the final files that would go into my short film and made my first foray into video editing using MGI Video Wave, a drag-and-drop easy program bundled with Sony's still and video cameras. Video Wave allowed me to edit, touch-up, and order my clips and stills, which I could run with the native audio or theme-appropriate music tracks. Finally, I tossed my MPEG movie back onto the Memory Stick and transferred the film to my Dell PC via a freshly installed Sony's Memory Stick slot-equipped 24x10x40 CD-R/RW drive. Sony bundles B's Recorder Gold with its CD-R/RW drives, and B's offers a VideoCD option, which allows me to burn a disc of Mesopotamia for the archives (and playback on a VideoCD-capable DVD player).
Kahn says the CDMavica does have the advantage of immediate archiving, but says that even with the use of 8cm discs, the size of the cameras remained quite large compared to the Memory Stick alternatives. SanDisk's Lewis thinks that Memory Stick could, eventually, serve as an archival media, but believes that the price point would have to come down significantly (prices range from about $25 for an 8MB stick to about $90 for a 128MB stick). Besides, he also believes that storage is just a starting point for Memory Stick capability and that its small size and extensive interoperability are key to its success.
Memory Stick is more than memory, according to Kahn. "It is a communication protocol," he says, that works under the USB 1.1 spec, which provides max write speeds of 1.8Mbps. and 2.45Mbps max read speed. He says, "It is a means to communicate data as well as to allow peripheral devices to communicate via the 10-pin connection the Memory Stick employs." While it is not, in fact, a port, he says, it does offer "port-like connectivity."
Currently, Sony's Memory Stick devices include laptops, PCs, projectors, mice, televisions, cellular phones, digital music players, printers, PDAs, cameras, and its robotic dog, AIBO. Other companies employ Memory Stick for kiosks, stereos, televisions, DVD players, and car navigation systems.
| Memory Stick | SmartMedia | CompactFlash | MultiMedia Card | SD Memory Card |
| Size | 21.5x50x2.8 | 37x45x0.76 | 42.8x36.4x3.3 | 24x32x1.4 | 24x32x2.1 |
| Weight (g) | 4 | 2 | 8-15 | 1.5 | 2 |
| Developer | Sony ('98) | Toshiba ('95) | SanDisk ('94) | Siemens SanDisk('97) | Matsushita
Toshiba
SanDisk ('00) |
| No. of pins | 10 | 22 | 50 | 7 | 9 |
| Storage Capacity (MB) | 8-128MB | 4-128MB | 4-512MB (1GB type II) | 4-256MB | 8-256MB |
| Copyright Protection | Adherence to SDMI (MagicGate) | ID | ID | ID | Adherence to SDMI |
| Data Transfer Rate | 1.8Mbps (Max)
2.45Mbps | N/A | 2Mbps burst (R)
1Mbps brst (W) | 1.2Mbps burst (R)
800Kbps burst (W) | 2.4Mbps burst (R)
2.0Mbps burst (W) |
The Future of Memory
Sony and SanDisk recently announced plans to collaborate on the next generation of Memory Stick. According to SanDisk's Lewis, the goals for Memory Stick 2, as Lewis called it, are simple: more capacity and more speed. They've announced plans for 256MB, 512MB, and up to 1GB sticks made available between 2002 and 2003. Memory Stick 2 will start at the 128MB capacity and go up from there.
The current iteration of Memory Stick, according to Lewis, "is capacity-limited. Due to firmware limitations, it is unable to go past 128MB." Though Sony's Kahn says it is too soon to speculate whether Memory Stick 2 will be in the same form-factor or even have the same pin connection, Lewis believes that is likely. But he says it is still undetermined if it will be backward-compatible or not.
With increased capacity will come the need for greater transfer speeds. Memory Stick media developers are working on up to 20Mbps transfer speeds in 2003. Lewis says that write speed, as it relates to Memory Stick, is best expressed in "click-to-click speed." He says, "Think about pressing the shutter down and how quickly you can take the next photo." Lewis is optimistic that 256MB sticks may be available as early as the end of the year and that prices may come down as much as 20% this year.
Kahn says that Memory Stick's future will be bright for reasons other than increased capacity and speed. He points to Sony's Bluetooth wireless communications protocol-enabled Infosticks (see sidebar). He refers to his earlier mobile video example, saying, "It will get even better with Sony's new MicroMV network camera, the DCRIP7BT" (for Bluetooth). "Imagine you are in that same jungle and you have this small camera, which records native MPEG-2 in MV format onto tape. You get a great shot and you need to get it to someone immediately. This camera allows you to send an email directly from the camera and have it instantly communicate that data to any Bluetooth-equipped device, like a Motorola camera."
Yang sees other Memory Stick applications on the horizon as well. He says, "In 2002, we are planning to introduce MS-ROM, which will contain vendor-supplied reference guides, games, and music that are read-only." Kahn reminds us, "Sony has its roots in the video industry, so, who better than Sony to bring out products that work for our traditional consumer who is from the video community?" He adds, "There are some features coming down the pipeline that will really bring videographers to the Memory Stick fold."
Sony Style's Web site bespeaks even loftier ambitions: "Memory Stick media was designed to allow you to link data between a host of different digital devices. Not only does it seamlessly connect dozens of devices today, but in the future, imagine being able to take pictures while you check the time from your Memory Stick watch/camera; download up to an hour's worth of music, and save it to your Memory Stick media in about three seconds with high-speed transfer technology; wear a portable audio player like jewelry—so small it's not much bigger than a 50-cent coin; capture digital images or screen images of your favorite TV show onto Memory Stick media; or find your way around town with your own personal Global Positioning System attached to your handheld device."
As memory moves into the future, it wants to stretch its legs a bit and serve as more than just a place where precious information is stored. Memory Stick wants to be not only the keeper of memory, but the conduit for its use and expression as well. So next year, if I suffer from snow blindness and my wireless email cops out, at least the Memory Stick GPS in my PDA will help me find my way back to Mesopotamia.
(For more on the future of portable memory, see Geoff Daily's "Flashpoint," www.emedialive.com/r11/2003/daily0403.html.)
SIDEBAR: Sony Infostick Bluetooth Module
The next generation of Memory Sticks will include the Infostick Bluetooth wireless data exchange solution, which uses the Bluetooth wireless communications protocol. Infostick is part of Sony's ongoing effort to develop uses for the Memory Stick Expansion Module, which utilizes the form factor and interface terminals/protocols of the Memory Stick to add various hardware functions to compliant products.
According to Michael Kahn, marketing manger for Sony's digital imaging products division, "We are developing Infostick, the Bluetooth product, which is a pure network product in the wireless sense." He clarifies that Sony uses the word network to mean sharing for consumer and individual applications, but he says, "In terms of an MIS person's idea of networking, we offer Infostick."
The Infostick was developed using Sony's proprietary baseband LSI chip and high-density mounting technology. The baseband LSI chip integrates multiple functions including a Bluetooth baseband controller, a Memory Stick interface, a flash memory controller, and a CPU into a single chip. High-density mounting technology allows the baseband LSI chip, RF module, flash memory, antenna, and EEPROM to be integrated within a single circuit board to realize the compact Memory Stick form factor.
By inserting an Infostick into Memory Stick Expansion Module-compliant products, such as digital cameras, personal computers, televisions, and the like, quick and simple wireless data exchange can be conducted between the hardware via radio waves. The featured prototype has a transmission range of approximately 10 meters, and transfer rate of 1Mbps in accordance with Bluetooth specifications. Having developed the basic prototype, Sony will now work to explore new possibilities for the Infostick to add new functions, such as Internet access capability and network setup capabilities. Memory Stick Expansion Modules are devices that expand the functionality of Memory Stick-enabled devices, such as handhelds (PDA), PCs, mobile phones, and more. There are now four working prototypes of the Memory Stick Expansion Module that include the Infostick, camera module, GPS module, and fingerprint recognition module.
Companies Mentioned in This Article
Panasonic www.panasonic.com
SanDisk www.sandisk.com
Sony www.memorystick.com, www.storagebysony.com