Howard Winter wrote:
> I can beat that!  :-)  I have a Minolta Dimage V, which uses *5V* SmartMedia cards, which have the cutaway 
> corner on the opposite side from the 3V3 cards (good bit of design by someone).  Readers that accept those 
> disappeared about 4 or 5 years ago...

Urk. Pray that the cards you've got don't fail...

> I have to say that I almost never use it these days though, in favour of my Canon SureShot S50, which uses 
> CompactFlash (anyone else think this name is ironic, since it's the largest of the card formats?  :-)  

It's one of the fastest though, and one of the easiest to interface to a 
microprocessor. No serial bus needed, just shove it on the system bus and add 
an address decoder. Heck, you don't even need to write drivers - put it in IDE 
mode and use a bog-standard IDE hard disc driver.

MemoryStick is only really used on Sony kit because the licensing requirements 
are downright insane (or so I've been told). SD is marginally better, but you 
still have to pay a few thousand dollars and sign an NDA to get a copy of the 
SD Card spec. MMC isn't as bad because most of the specs are open (SanDisk put 
the MMC OEM Manual online for free download a while back) but it's still N 
thousand dollars if you want a copy of the 'official' spec.

CF is a completely open standard. "Here's the spec, if you're making a host 
device you don't need to pay us anything, but if you want to make cards you 
have to pay us". Sounds fair enough to me. Plus the rather large form factor 
makes it relatively easy to stuff lots and lots of flash chips in there, hence 
why the larger sized cards tend to be CF. MMC and SD are catching up, but 
there's still only enough room in the plastic to fit one or two Flash chips 
inside.

> But having a swivelling (and removeable!) lens unit is handy for taking candid shots, or in enclosed spaces 
> such as under floorboards (following wiring runs, or investigating the insects making a meal of my house's 
> woodwork).

I remember seeing a camcorder like that... I think it was the Sharp ViewCam. 
You could turn the lens through 180 degrees, IIRC.

The family camcorder is a Sony CCD-FX300E (or something like that). One of the 
old Video 8 things. I think it's about ten years old now, and it still works 
fine. The "CAMERA/OFF/PLAY" switch is a bit dodgy though - once you push it 
onto CAMERA, you need to wiggle it a bit to get the switch to engage. We put 
up with it 'cos it spends most of its life in the cupboard, and on the few 
occasions when it does come out it's only for a few hours. Too much trouble to 
wire everything up to transfer from Video8 to VHS...

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