xD-Picture Card

~ the obit ~

There is no announcement. No press release, no end-of-life notice, nothing from Olympus and nothing from Fujifilm. The xD-Picture Card stopped appearing in the boxes, and the two companies that had invented it went on selling cameras with a different slot cut into them as though the previous seven years had not happened.

It launched in July 2002 as a joint format from Olympus and Fujifilm, manufactured under contract by Toshiba and Samsung. A handful of other brands resold it with nobody else's logo on the card. The name came from "eXtreme digital". At 20 by 25 millimeters it was the smallest card on the shelf, which counted for something when compact cameras were competing on thinness, and it replaced SmartMedia in both companies' lines.

That was the whole technical case, and it held for about two years. SD was already the format everything else used, so it got cheaper faster and bigger faster. It also turned up in readers people already owned for other reasons. xD topped out at 2 gigabytes and never moved off it. By September 2009 a 2 GB xD card was going for roughly three times what the same capacity cost in SD, for a card that worked in cameras from two manufacturers.

I was at university when compact cameras properly arrived in Turkey, and the effort in owning one was never the shooting. It was getting the pictures off. That happened on a machine that was not yours: a photo shop counter, somebody else's desktop, a cafe box with a reader taped to the front of the case. Those readers all knew SD, because SD was in everything. Turning up with an xD card meant bringing the camera and its cable as well and hoping the thing would mount. A memory format is worth exactly what the nearest stranger's computer can read.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four types in seven years ~

The original cards carried no type letter at all, and were called Standard or Type S only once there was something to tell them apart from. Type M arrived in February 2005, using multi-level cells to reach 2 GB and paying for the capacity in write speed. Type H came in November 2005 with the fastest writes any xD card managed, about 4 megabytes a second, and was killed off in 2008 because it cost too much to manufacture. Type M+ appeared in April 2008, roughly a year before both owners walked away.

Four revisions in seven years and the ceiling never moved. There were public plans for 8 GB xD cards. They were never built.

~ the adapter that fit one brand ~

The clearest sign a format is losing is when its own owner ships you a way out of it. From August 2008 Olympus started including a small adapter called the MASD-1 with certain cameras, which let a microSD card sit in the xD slot. It physically fit only Olympus bodies made between August 2008 and August 2009, and some of those needed a firmware update before it would work at all. Forcing it into anything else would damage the slot.

Fujifilm did not bother with an adapter. It shipped cameras with two slots instead, one for xD and one for SD, which is the same admission written more plainly.

~ what stopped ~

Olympus announced the E-P1 on 16 June 2009 with an SD slot and nothing else in it. The last Fujifilm camera to accept xD was the FinePix F200EXR, announced in February 2009, and it took SD as well. The final Olympus bodies that used the format shipped in August 2009, and the cards went with them. On Amazon's own listing for xD cards, nothing has a first-available date later than 4 August 2009.

What that leaves is a particular kind of dead object. There are working cameras in drawers all over the world that will not accept any card sold today, sitting next to cards that no computer bought since about 2010 has a slot for. The technology did not stop working. Two companies decided a proprietary accessory was worth more to them than a standard one, and were wrong by a margin that took seven years to become visible.

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