Olympus 200844 256 MB xD-Picture Card

by Olympus

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 1 x 0.1 x 0.8 inches ; 0.3 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00008CQJO
• Item model number: 200844
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 28, 2003

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The Olympus xD-Picture Card is compact for smaller and more stylish digital devices. It's powerful for amazing memory capacity now, and increased memory capacity in the future. It's durable, making it a media you can trust with your most valuable data. And it's versatile, for unprecedented device flexibility. Olympus xD-Picture Cards--the most advanced digital media cards ever for the best digital images yet. Nothing's impossible.

Quickly and easily transferring images and data to a computer is a cinch when the Olympus xD-Picture Card is used with any xD-compatible product. And it's just as easy using non-xD devices as well, thanks to a number of groundbreaking adapters that will be available, including a CompactFlash Adapter, SmartMedia USB Reader/Writer, and PCMCIA/PC Card Adapter.

Designed with the most advanced storage technology available, the Olympus xD-Picture Card system meets the memory capacity needs of today, while also being readily available to fulfill the increased memory capacity needs of tomorrow.

Olympus xD-Picture Cards are the only xD cards that support the Panorama function found on most Olympus digital cameras.

Product Description

Olympus xD-Picture Card

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent and reliable, August 24, 2003

By 

Jean Troiano (folsom, ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Olympus 200844 256 MB xD-Picture Card (Personal Computers)

I bought this card for my olympus 300 digital camera just before leaving the US for 2 weeks in Europe. I used the card daily, taking at least 50 pictures at high resolution a day. One day I actually shot over 200 pictures. It worked flawlessly every time.

238 of 257 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tiny and promising, but do we really need it?, April 15, 2003

By 

Gadgester "No Time, No Money" (Mother Earth) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Olympus 200844 256 MB xD-Picture Card (Personal Computers)

Measuring at an incredibly small 0.8 x 1.0 x 0.07 inches, xD picture cards are a new flash storage format jointly developed by Fuji and Olympus, the two largest manufacturers of digital cameras in the world, as a futuristic successor to the SmartMedia card. The xD cards are actually manufactured by Toshiba, known for its promotion of the competing Secure Digital (SD) flash storage format, and are about 1/3 the size of a SmartMedia card and slightly smaller than SD and MMC cards. (Confused by the alphabet soup yet?)

Sidebar: xD stands for "extreme digital"

But smallness does not mean lameness. Fuji and Olympus promise very high read/write speeds (3MB/sec for writes and 5MB/sec for reads) as well as lower power consumption for the xD cards. They also claim that eventually xD's capacity will reach 8GB (!!!), although no timetable has been set. Right now xD cards come in 32MB, 64MB, 128MB and 256MB flavors, and generally cost 50% more than same-capacity SD cards, but their prices are likely to drop quickly as more digital cameras accept the format.

Which brings us to the critical question, how many digital cameras accept xD cards? Not many at this point, and digital cameras that accept SmartMedia cannot use xD. But given the market clout of Olympus and Fuji, we'll surely see more xD-friendly models soon. The question is whether other camera producers (Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Toshiba...) will also adopt the technology. My prediction is since Canon has made a commitment to continued use of CompactFlash, they are unlikely to go with the xD. Toshiba manufactures xD cards for Fuji and Olympus, so they may adopt it if they see serious commitment by the latter two.

Since so far few cameras use the xD format, there is little real-world comparison between xD and competing formats such as SD and Sony's MemoryStick/MemoryStick PRO. Whether you'll need xD is entirely dependent on whether the digital camera you choose will accept it. My advice is pick a digital camera without regard to the storage format it takes, because all the formats out there -- SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, and now xD -- get the job done.

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a commodity if you shoot in Panorama Mode, July 2, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Olympus 200844 256 MB xD-Picture Card (Personal Computers)

Several reviewers have indicated xD memory is a commodity. Buyer beware: If you have an Olympus digital camera, and you shoot in the Panorama mode (which I use regularly and really like when snowboarding and backpacking), you HAVE TO HAVE AN OLYMPUS BRANDED xD CARD; non-Olympus cards don't support and won't enter the mode