Instruction of XD Picture Card
Instruction of XD Picture Card - XD-Picture Card is a flash memory card format, used mainly in older digital cameras. XD stands for Extreme Digital. XD cards are available in capacities of 16 MB up to 2 GB.
The cards were developed by Olympus and Fujifilm, and introduced into the market in July 2002. Toshiba Corporation and Samsung Electronics manufacture the cards for Olympus and Fujifilm. XD cards are sold under other brands, including Kodak, SanDisk, PNY, and Lexar, but are not branded with the respective companies' logos, except for Kodak. Because of its higher cost and limited usage in products other than digital cameras, XD has lost ground to SD, which is broadly used by cellular phones, personal computers, digital audio players and most other digital camera manufacturers.
Olympus began to earnestly move away from the XD format with the release of the E-P1 camera, which supports only SD memory cards. As of Spring 2010, all new Olympus cameras announced at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show and Photo Marketing Association International Trade Show can use SD cards. Note that this changeover to the SD card format has never been officially announced by Olympus corporation.
The original XD cards were available in 16 MB to 512 MB capacities. The Type M card, released in February 2005, uses multi-level cell (MLC) architecture to achieve a theoretical storage capacity of up to 8 GB. As of June 2010, Type M cards are available in sizes from 256 MB to 2 GB. However, the Type M suffers from slower read/write speeds than the original cards.
The Type H card, first released in November 2005, offers higher data rates than Type M cards (theoretically as much as 3 times faster). As of 2008, Type H cards were only available in 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB, and 2 GB capacities. Both Fuji and Olympus discontinued the production of Type H cards in 2008, citing high production costs.
The Type M+ card, first released in April 2008, offers data rates 1.5 times that of Type M cards. As of 2008, cards are available only in 1 and 2 GB capacities. Olympus says that its XD cards support special "picture effects" when used in some Olympus cameras, though these software features are not intrinsically hardware-dependent. Type H and M+ cards however, are required in newer models to capture video at high rate (640×480 @ 30fps). Due to changes in the cards' storage architecture, newer Type M and H cards may have compatibility issues with some older cameras (especially video recording). Compatibility lists are available for Olympus: Olympus America's and Fujifilm's. Newer cards are incompatible with some card readers.
Tips
If you are using these cards but found that your important files were lost from them, try to use uFlysoft Mac data recovery software to recover the lost files back. If you are a Windows user, uFlysoft Photo Recovery for Windows will help you a lot.
