The xD-Picture Card is a type of flash memory memory card, used mainly in digital cameras. xD stands for extreme Digital. The cards were introduced into the market in July 2002 and developed by Olympus and Fujifilm. Toshiba Corporation and Samsung Electronics manufacture the cards for Olympus and Fujifilm. Other brands, including Kodak, SanDisk, and Lexar, now sell xD cards.

Card specifications

xD cards are used in Olympus, and Fujifilm digital cameras and Olympus digital voice recorders; Fujifilm also made an MP3 player that used the cards.[1] As of 2006 xD cards are available in these capacities: 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB, and 2 GB. An xD card is 20 mm × 25 mm × 1.78 mm and weighs 2.8 grams.

Type M and Type H cards

The original XD cards were available in 16 MB—512 MB capacities. The Type M card, released in February 2005 [2], uses Multi Level Cell (MLC) architecture to achieve a theoretical storage capacity of up to 8 GB. As of August 2006, Type M cards are available in sizes from 256 MB to 2 GB. However, the Type M suffers slower read-write speeds than the original cards. The Type H card, first released in November 2005 [3], offers higher data rates than Type M cards (theoretically as much as 3 times faster).[4] As of 2006, Type H cards are only available in 256MB, 512 MB and 1 GB capacities. Olympus xD cards, include special “picture effects”, although most of these are only available in use with Olympus digital cameras. Due to changes in the cards' storage architecture, newer Type M and H cards may suffer compatibility issues with some older cameras (especially video recording). Compatibility lists are available for Olympus (PDF format) and Fujifilm. The newer cards are also incompatible with some card readers.

[source:'wikipedia']

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