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April 2003|Film is dead in many of its former strongholds, or at least quietly making the final descent into obsolescence. Sure, some will contend there's a depth, richness, and texture to film which will find no equal in the pixelated grid of digital photography and video—and we won't argue the point here. But for those unhindered by purism, pickiness, or professional necessity, going digital opens up hitherto unimagined possibilities. Home or budget-constrained filmmakers and photographers no longer must lug around camera bags sized to house a small child. They can record the sounds and images of their lives or work onto media the size of a stick of gum, or even a postage stamp. They can then crop, edit, and gussy-up these clips with the click of a button and drag of an icon on their desktop or portable PC, creating instant masterpieces, or at least semi-professional hack jobs. And make no mistake—for all the attention lavished on digital cameras and camcorders, digital media-attuned PCs, FireWire cards, editing software, and the like—those miniscule memory cards just might be the unsung heroes of the digital studio world. We're quickly reaching a point where nearly every piece of visual information has at one time or another been passed through a computer. While this change in course represents the future, it has not completely taken hold, in large part because we can't all seem to settle on a carrier. As yet, there's no universal vehicle for transferring that information from the input source to the PC; standards have yet to be unified and costs yet to be lowered to the level needed to make them must-buy products for consumers and prosumers alike. Several companies are vying to establish their version of the portable memory card as the universal standard, and each has much to gain by its acceptance: exclusive rights to a sizeable chunk of the digital camera, digital audio player, digital camcorder, photo-ready printer, and PDA markets. It's this prize that pits two corporate giants, Panasonic and Sony, against each other in the war between a postage stamp and a stick of gum. Should this war yield a victor, the real winner, of course, will be the user, who will be spared yet another format war. But these things never sort themselves out that simply, do they? More Than a Two-Horse Race
Today's portable flash storage card (PFSC) market involves more than just Sony's Memory Stick and Panasonic's SD (formerly Secure Digital). There's CompactFlash, the granddaddy of them all. It's the largest in size and also in capacity. Currently, it maxes out at 1GB, but prototypes up to 3GB were introduced in November 2002. It comes in two formats, Types I and II. Type II requires a fatter slot that is available on few consumer devices and fewer prosumer peripherals, while Type I serves the consumer market. A major drawback to this technology is its lack of data encryption, and therefore data security. MultiMediaCard, developed by SanDisk, provided the working knowledge from which SD was developed, and many SD devices will recognize MultiMediaCards, according to SanDisk retail product marketing manager Eric Bone. SanDisk helped found not just the MultiMediaCard, but also the CompactFlash and SD formats, and is currently the largest manufacturer of PFSCs in the world. While slightly thinner than SD (1.4mm to 2.1mm), MultiMediaCard also lacks data security features, is said to be less reliable than its progeny, and reaches capacities of only 128MB. Its main niche comes in specific products such as Nokia cell phones, some Kodak consumer digital cameras, and SonicBlue MP3 players. Another contender, SmartMedia, comes up a few brain cells short of its competition because it lacks the built-in memory controller common to other cards. Instead of locating in the card, SmartMedia relies on controllers inside the peripherals with which it is used. This limits the capacity of SmartMedia cards to what the firmware's controllers can handle, which is currently stuck at 128MB. That said, SmartMedia remains the thinnest card on the market—a big advantage in these parts—and continues to be supported by Fuji and Olympus in their popular consumer and prosumer digital still cameras. All of these entrants into the PFSC market leave something to be desired, either in capacity or security. This is why even a format-independent manufacturer of all things PFSC like SanDisk's Bone sees this "emerging as a two-sided battle between Sony and Panasonic," with neither side willing to give an inch in this most space-conscious of spheres.
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