No consensus on storage format in a digital camera

CompactFlash or Memory Stick? Secure Digital or xD? If you're shopping for a digital camera, prepare to get familiar with these terms, which describe different versions of the small cards that act as the digital equivalent of film in this booming class of consumer gadget.

Where most emerging consumer technology products wind up settling on one standard or another – along the lines of the floppy disk or the DVD – the digital camera market continues to support a handful of conflicting storage standards that are likely here to stay, analysts say, because manufacturers have no motivation to switch. Sales of the various types of flash memory closely match sales of the digital cameras that use them. While other consumer gadgets sometimes use this kind of memory, valued for its ability to store data even when the power is off, digital imaging continues to drive the market.

The market for digital cameras and their flash memory can be divided into four roughly equal chunks of the flash-memory market. Sony uses its own format, the chewing-gum-size Memory Stick, and held 24 per cent of the U.S. digital-camera market last year, according to the research firm IDC. The smaller Secure Digital Card, or SD Card, is supported by such major players as Kodak and Hewlett-Packard, which by themselves own more than 20 per cent of the market. The postage-stamp-size xD-Picture Card is a new format, developed by Olympus and Fuji; those two companies also hold just over a quarter of the U.S. market, and memory manufacturers predict that the format will eventually grab a corresponding chunk of the market as these firms phase out an earlier format, SmartMedia.

Most of the rest of the market, the last quarter or so, goes to CompactFlash, the bulkiest of the bunch, and one of the original digital film standards. "It's a hideously complicated category,'' groused Stephen Baker, analyst at research firm NPD Group. "There doesn't seem to be any hope that this is going to clear up. If anything, it's going to get more complicated.''

At first glance, the reasons for such a format war are a little perplexing. The underlying technology of flash memory is pretty much the same in each format, despite often minor differences in shapes and sizes. Most consumers would prefer to have fewer confusing options to ponder when shopping for a digital camera, right? Sure, said Chris Chute, an analyst at IDC. But it's not as simple as that. "It's not a consumer-driven issue,'' he said, "it's more a revenue-and-manufacturing-driven issue.''

One way for a digital-camera maker to keep business and build brand loyalty in the digital age is to push a proprietary format, one that works well with its own gadgets but poorly or not at all with other companies' hardware. Most notably, consumer electronics juggernaut Sony uses its Memory Stick format across the spectrum of its consumer electronics products – not only in its digital cameras but also in its computers, hand-held organisers and even TVs. While this is useful for loyal Sony customers who want to easily swap digital files from one device to another, other manufacturers have been reluctant to support Sony's format.

Some of them are busy experimenting with their own approaches: Olympus-toting shutterbugs, for example, can take advantage of a panorama feature on their cameras only if they use memory cards with the Olympus brand on them. Other standards don't have corporate backing, however. The venerable CompactFlash standard has traditionally had a firm hold across the spectrum of high-end cameras because of its larger top-end capacity: The cards can hold a whopping two gigabytes' worth of digital snapshots today, and memory maker Lexar Media plans to introduce four-gigabyte cards this summer. Some analysts think that CompactFlash could eventually wane as a format for consumer products as tinier competitors catch up to that kind of capacity. Though Secure Digital and xD have only a top capacity of 512 megabytes today, memory makers are developing cards that should soon meet or exceed the gigabyte mark for these formats.

While this can be confusing when you're standing at the camera store wondering what type of memory you were supposed to pick up for your aunt, industry observers shrug that this format battle isn't a particularly raw deal for consumers—prices for all the formats are dropping at about the same rate, about 30 per cent a year.


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