Trivia question: What company commissioned the first memory cards?
Flash memory cards, along with digital cameras, sounded the death knell for traditional film cameras and dealt a serious blow to companies like Kodak and Fuji that depended on that industry.
So it's ironic that Kodak was one of the two companies that commissioned the CompactFlash card. (Canon was the other.) The format, coined in 1994, was the first successful flash card. Kodak had made a digital camera but the storage device inside of it made the camera big and bulky. The company, along with Canon, then commissioned SanDisk to come up with something smaller. The CompactFlash card was the result, way back in the '90s, according to SanDisk CEO Eli Harari.
Ultimately, Casio, not Kodak, had the first commercial success with digital cameras and many other companies, but not Kodak, made piles of money on flash cards. Kodak tried to do its own branded memory cards too, but was late.
"They had it all," Harari said.
- signifies the death of open standards
- by scottthesculptor August 13, 2007 11:05 AM PDT
- Compact flash was a simple modification of the existing PCMCIA flash memory standard - same connector and ATA interface, shorter length.
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- I don't get it
- by skguine August 13, 2007 12:25 PM PDT
- But it seems like the SD card is on the rise. Isn;t that "open?" Or is the argument that the SD card is slower than CF? This is not my area of focus, so you tell me.
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- xD too
- by Maccess August 13, 2007 11:45 PM PDT
- Aside from memory stick, don't forget Olympus' xD which costs twice as much as SD/MMC and is half as fast.
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(3 Comments)It wasn't owned by Kodak so they wouldn't have made money - but it made a fast, easy to implement storage solution.
So of course all of the other camera manufacturers had to make their own standards so that they could profit on proprietary memory. Sony started it with the memory stick - and has lost market share because of it.
Compact Flash is *still* the fastest, highest capacity, and most easily read flash memory package across all OSes.
The camera industry pretty much said "No thanks we have a smaller, slower format that we can gouge customers with"
These guys making proprietary memory formats don't think that consumers would like to have common memory cards in their cameras, smart phones, mp3 players etc. so they can swap them around as needed instead of carrying several cards and their respective readers around.
What happens if your digicam memcard fills up? If it's xD there's nothing you can do. If it's SD, you'll be able to swap out the card in your phone and use that temporarily.