IFA interview: Is SD the ace card?
By Ian Burley
28th August - 2001
Today Digital Photography Now interviewed Ray Creech, president of the Secure Digital (SD) Card Association, during his visit to the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. We could be on the verge of a big industry battle to establish dominance in the increasingly important memory card market. Few of us may have heard of SD to date, but the unfolding scenario could see the VHS/Beta war repeated in solid state form.
Key points:
The SD memory card platform, which is being promoted by Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and Sandisk is in its infancy. The SD Card Association is only in its 19th month. But some industry watchers believe it could eventually dominate the memory card sector. Ray Creech’s job is to manage and promote the interests of over 300 member companies who have licensed SD technology.
At IFA vendors have been showing a prototype 256MB SD card that can store and play up to 10 minutes of DVD-quality video. The largest commercially available SD capacity is 128MB, with 256MB coming on stream by the end of the year.
Faster and bigger next year
More significantly, according to Creech, will be the availability of NAND flash memory from Toshiba next year. This type of flash memory technology, that Toshiba owns the rights to, uses only one transistor per memory cell instead of the more conventional two. It can increase typical data transfer rates from 1.8MB/sec to 5MB/sec and its areal density is four times more efficient.
Creech confidently predicts that we could see this next generation flash memory in 1GB SD cards by the end of next year . 2GB versions are expected in late 2003 and 4GB in late 2004/early 2005. Remember, this is a device less than half the size of a Type I CF card.
Significantly, says Creech, without Toshiba’s NAND flash technology, other compact memory card vendors will have problems with speed and capacity over 512MB. That’s a thinly veiled comment on the future of Sony Memory Stick. Of course there shouldn’t be anything to stop Sony from sourcing NAND flash parts for Memory Stick in the future, but SD will have a head start in terms of supply and cost.
Sony recently revealed that sales of MS had overtaken SmartMedia. This shouldn’t be too surprising as SM is an ageing standard. In some ways, though, MS is a triumph for Sony as they have achieved their success without the need for third party manufacturers.
SD to overtake MS by 2004?
But in the long term that lack of an independent source could be its Achilles heel. Memory stick already commands a significant price premium over CF that consumers are beginning to be sensitive to, says Creech . SD has the advantage of being an industry wide open standard with multiple product sources. He adds that he has third party statistical projections that indicate SD will overtake MS by the end of 2003.
SD is beginning to creep into consumer consciousness. Palm Inc., which makes pocket computers, for example, has adopted SD in preference to Compact Flash (CF) and, SmartMedia (SM) or Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick (MS) platforms.
Kodak’s SD commitment
Kodak is committed to SD-enabling its digital camera products, starting with the DX3215 that ships next month. Unsurprisingly, Panasonic is introducing both digital movie and still cameras that support SD memory cards.
Creech mentioned that while SD was invented with the digital media publishing market in mind, its early popularity is in fact in the digital camera market, accounting for 12% of sales at present.
But that’s not all; next week the SD Card Association will publish agreed specifications for use of SD cards for video, personal information data and image file storage applications. The specification for SD I/O, the use of the SD card port as device interface, will also be published next week.
SD camera shown
At the IFA show this week Palm Inc. has been demonstrating an SD Bluetooth card. Bluetooth is the emerging wireless data connectivity standard for all manner of devices, including cameras, PCs, phones and printers. At the show you can also see a GPS (global positioning by satellite) receiver SD device and, you guessed it, a tiny digital camera that plugs into an SD card slot.
SD will complement CF
DPN’s feeling is that SD has a good chance of replacing SM in the digital camera stakes, but that CF will continue to dominate the mid-higher end. This is what Sandisk, that promotes both standards tells us too.
In the end most of us just want a good memory card standard that does the job and uncertainty over the future of the existing players is frustrating. But that’s something we have to live with in this competitive IT world of ours. In the end, we consumers will benefit… we just have to be patient.
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DPN News service
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