SmartMedia

~ the goodbye ~

The name it launched under was Solid State Floppy Disk Card, and the object was built to look like the thing it was named after. A flat plastic rectangle, 45 by 37 millimeters and 0.76 thick, one corner notched, with a bank of gold contacts sitting exposed on one face. Toshiba announced it on 15 May 1995 at two megabytes, 12,000 yen for the card and 25,000 for the PC Card adapter that read it. Photography is not mentioned in that press release. The pitch was expandable storage for portable equipment, and the reference point was the floppy.

The consortium followed in April 1996: the SSFDC Forum, 37 members at founding, existing to make this an industry standard. The marketing name became SmartMedia and the product went into cameras rather than laptops. By around 2001 it held close to half the digital camera market, carried mostly by two companies. Olympus and Fujifilm put the slot in almost everything they shipped. Music hardware took it too, and a Yamaha QY100 sequencer or a Korg Electribe wrote its patterns to the same card a camera wrote pictures to.

The design decision that made it cheap is the one that killed it. A SmartMedia card is a NAND flash die in a piece of plastic with no controller on board, so everything a controller normally handles fell to whatever device the card was plugged into. Wear leveling was the camera's job. Recognizing a card larger than the one the firmware knew about meant a firmware update, which for most people meant the card did not work. Nothing above 128 MB ever shipped, and a rumored 256 was advertised in specifications that never turned into product.

Nobody chose this format. That is the honest distance on it and it holds in Turkey the same as anywhere else. A memory card is not a purchase, it is a consequence of a purchase somebody made for other reasons: you bought a camera on the price, or because it was the one the shop had, and the slot inside it had already been decided by a Japanese manufacturer in a standards meeting years earlier. You found out which side of the format war you were on at the counter, later, when you needed a second card and the man reached under the glass for whichever one your body took.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the card with no brain ~

The missing controller shows up everywhere in the way these cards behaved. There were two electrical versions, five volt and three point three volt, and the packaging was identical apart from which corner carried the notch. Push a 3.3 volt card into a reader wired only for 5 and the card was destroyed, not confused. Every guide from that era tells you to buy a dual voltage reader, which is advice that only exists because the card could not defend itself.

Write protection was a sticker. There was a small circle printed on one face and you covered it with a metallic disc to make the card read only, and peeled it off to write again, which meant a card that had been in a bag for a year could quietly become writable. The format also carried a copy protection feature called ID, used by Game Park to lock commercial games for the GP32 handheld and by Samsung's 1999 Yepp Hip-Hop player to satisfy the music industry's DRM specification of the moment.

~ the floppy adapter ~

FlashPath is the object that explains the original name. It was a plastic shell the size and shape of a 3.5 inch floppy disk with a slot cut in the end, and you pushed the SmartMedia card into it and then pushed the whole thing into a floppy drive. The computer saw a floppy. It ran at floppy speed and on a Macintosh it only read, but in 1998 it meant a laptop with no card reader and no spare USB port could still get pictures off a camera.

There were adapters for PCMCIA and for CompactFlash Type II as well, which is how a SmartMedia card ended up inside a slot designed for a competing format. That is the whole personality of the thing. It was the cheapest and thinnest card in the room and it spent its life being carried around inside shells built for something else.

~ the backers left ~

On 30 July 2002, Fujifilm and Olympus announced the xD-Picture Card. The cards were manufactured by Toshiba, which is to say the company that owned SmartMedia built the card that replaced it, on behalf of the only two customers who had been keeping SmartMedia alive. Product shipped in August 2002 topping out at 64 MB, with 128 arriving in September. Toshiba's own direction went to SD.

After that there is no shutdown to report, because a memory card format does not get switched off. Cards kept selling while stock lasted, manufacturing ended somewhere in the middle of the decade, and the last new device designed around the format had already shipped. The replacement did not do much better. xD was itself abandoned in 2009 when Olympus and Fujifilm both moved to SD, which by then had won everything, and the two formats now sit next to each other in the same drawer.

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