Why is SD so X?

[jlpk007]

SD is so expensive....my 32mb card is too small and a 128 SD card costs 130++...where as a CF of the same capacity is much cheaper...

[ckiang]

Coz it's still new, has lots of potential, and has additional security features when you use it with supported devices (usually music players, but no one cares about that anyway).

Regards
CK

[jlpk007]

new and harder to get also...went to sLs and a lot of shop dun carry SD .......

[matthew]

Probably more expensive not just due to volume (not as popular as CF) but also probably licence fees paied to some ARIA subsidary for the 'secure' bit, some method of stoping music files being copied/exchanged with the cards.

The same people keep pushing the U.S. to get similar techology forced into IDE disk drives.

[darr]

It's a promising technology, being truly small and its technology is proven and robust. But then having Panasonic leading the pack is some cause for concern, given their track records....fortunately many industrial giants are backing the technology.

Perfect complement to the CF for capacity and price and SD for size and speed. SD transfer rate is damn fast, as long as the camera can support, no need any funny 16x watever thing... and damn damn durable, never had a corrupted one before, unlike other formats which goes dead at least once and sometimes funny reading problems...

[matthew]

Quote: Originally posted by darr Perfect complement to the CF for capacity and price and SD for size and speed. SD transfer rate is damn fast, as long as the camera can support

That's cause other than the support for the digital rights management, the thing isn't much more than a bare flash chip.
There isn't a controller on the card/chip unlike CF which has a small microcontroller to manage the flash chip and the ATA disk protocol.

Does mean the flash management controller has to be fitted to the host device instead. Makes the device slightly more expensive but does enable that flexablity of using newer faster controlers in new models. Will also mean different devices will respond differently when the flash chip starts to get old and cells die, depending on how well the controller implements bad block management.

In theory SD/SM/XD cards should be cheaper as they are 'bare' dumb chips, but the devices that use them should be more expensive as they need the flash controller chip onboard. :-)

[darr]

Quote: Originally posted by matthew That's cause other than the support for the digital rights management, the thing isn't much more than a bare flash chip. There isn't a controller on the card/chip unlike CF which has a small microcontroller to manage the flash chip and the ATA disk protocol.

Precisely. hence the extreme reliability if you know how the other 'smart' chips fare... Actually those digicams and PDAs are not really much more expensive, factor in the size and features, its pretty much the same deal. You pay more and you get minature stuff with same if not better feature-set. Think DimageX and Palm.