John H said:
Newer Olympus cameras (like the 5050) have SM and xD slots, NO CF.
Though isn't SM limited to 128M due to thickness? Or wouldn't we have
seen a 256M SM by now?
---------------------------------------------
Both SM and CF cards think they are ATA disk drives. The principal
difference between an SM card and a CF card is that the CF card does
actually "think". An SM card is simply a logical drive mechanism. The
CF card also contains its own controller.
With an SM card the controller resides in the camera. If the controller
in the camera was designed for, say up to 64 MB media, that camera will
never be able to use larger media.
With a CF card the camera doesn't need to know anything about the inner
workings of the drive since the controller is within the drive. There
may be some hiccups in the range where certain magic numbers (like 4 GB)
come into play but, for the most part, cameras which acccept CF cards
should be able to keep moving up on storage size as the cards get larger.
The moral of this story is not to buy any camera that only understands
SM. I don't know much about XD other than it looks like too small, too
slow, proprietary technology with no advantage over its competition.
Oh, I forgot, they're smaller so we can lose them easier.
Wish I knew what's wrong to cause the 64 MB format compatibility
problem. I thought at first that the camera might be using a 12-bit FAT
(ala floppy disk) and non-standard 16 KB cluster size to reach 64 MB
whereas Windoze would choose a 16-bit FAT and 4 KB cluster size. If
that were true though I don't think Windoze could read the camera's
format just as the camera seems unable to recognize the Windoze format.
These kinds of stories are not uncommon though and any of us using
digital storage media should probably understand what's going on. The
answer is undoubtedly out there in the ether somewhere and I will report
back if I find out what it is. Anyone got the definitive answer already?
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
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