The Olympus 256mb Panorama xD-Picture Card - Is New Technology Really Better?

I recently purchased a 256 mb "Panorama" Olympus xD-Picture Card for a new Olympus C50 digital camera that my wife received on Mother's day. In 2002, Fuji and Olympus introduced a new type of flash memory cards for their digital camera's to provide us yet one more choice in the confusing flash card market, with 5 key players, compactflash, secure digital, smartmedia, memory stick, and xD Picture cards vying for our attention. Variants of these, like the microdrive compactflash card add further to the competition. However, Fuji and Olympus offered several reasons for needing a new type of flash media, including

- smaller size
- low power consumption
- more durable
- larger storage capacity
- ultimately lower cost than flash card types that include controller chips (SD and Compactflash)

All of these objectives appear laudable, and size, battery life, speed, cost and other issues limit how effectively we can use digital cameras and other memory card devices to a degree. Smartmedia, Fuji and Olympus' previous flash media of choice was limited in capacity, speed and size. xD flash memory is clearly an improvement over smartmedia cards in many ways, though the advantages over compactflash and secure digital aren't so impressive.

I purchased a 256mb Olympus xD-Picture club from my local Sams Club for $82.50 plus tax. The diminutive card w/xD card wallet came in an oversize blister package about 10" x 15" X 2", overwhelming the less than "postage stamp size" card and small media wallet. The black plastic card holder with spring loaded slots for up to six cards, which should help ensure you won't loose the card. 256 mb meant we would be able to store 200 or so high quality images, suitable for full page printouts, on one card. So far, so good.

Size and appearance - This xD card is 0.8" X 1" by 0.07" thick, easily covered by a postage stamp. About 40% of the back of the card is exposed contacts, when you slide the card into your camera or reader, these "contacts" must "make" to power and use the card. The exposed contacts are somewhat discomforting, but don't appear like they could be easily damaged, and Olympus claims the contacts can be cleaned with a soft cloth if needed. The front of the card displays a easily seen arrow to make it clear which way to insert the card, shows the size of the card in large print, and a small white area, about 3/16" X 1/2", which you can write on. It would be difficult to fit more than 3 or 4 letters, but its enough to allow you to distinguish your cards. The xD card appears to be very well made, with no flex, and I'll bet you could drop it many times without damaging it.

Low power consumption - Both Fuji and Olympus claim these cards draw less power than other types of flash memory. Our Olympus C50, which uses xD cards to store images, sports excellent battery life, compared to other digital cameras we've used. I suspect the xD card's contributions to its long battery life is just one of many factors, as most of the power supplied to digital cameras goes to the display and flash. Several vendors report that this card draws about 25mw when reading and writing. This would mean it draws about 1/3 the power of the best compactflash cards that I've read about, which should lead to improved battery life in devices that use this type of card.

Panorama Feature - Most Olympus digital cameras offer a Panorama Feature. In Panorama mode, your Olympus camera will take up to 10 images with overlapping edges, either horizontal or vertical, maintaining the same focus, zoom, white balance, and exposure settings, and "tag" those images as part of a single panaramic view as they are saved to the xD card. The Camedia photoediting software that comes with Olympus cameras will recognize the images as part of a complete panaramic set, and will join ("stitch) those images together into a single seamless panoramic image, useful for skylines, horizon shots, sunset views and any distant scenery. I've taken several multishot panoramic views with an Olympus C50 digital camera, and this feature works as advertised. The Camedia software immediately recognized all of the overlapping images, and combined them into a singe seamless wide (or tall) image, when that option was selected. The panoramic feature does not work with Fuji brand xD cards, and this is the single feature that sets Olympus xD cards apart from other brands. Note that some photo editing software packages, notably Roxio's Photosuite software, can duplicate this feature with images from any camera. Photosuite will take any images with overlapping borders and combine them to make a single panoramic view, though if different zoom or focus settings were used, the final panorama might not be as seamless as the Olympus/Camedia version.

Read/Write Speed - Fuji and Olympus rate xD cards to have read speeds of up to 5mb/sec, and that a 256 mb xD card should support write speeds of up to 3mb/second (32mb and 16mb xD cards support write speeds of up to only 1.3mb/sec). Since the image file sizes in 5mp digital cameras are easily 1-2mb in size, faster write speeds become critical to a camera's usability, as the default mode in most cameras won't allow you to take a new shot until the previous image has been saved. Unfortunately, in "real life", the speeds I see are much less than 3mb/sec nameplate write speeds, and typically not much different that speeds achieved with other types of flash media.

Using our C50 5mp digital camera, I took 10 shots, with the quality setting at the highest available for jpg images (2560 X 1920 pixels). Each image varied in size from 2.0mb to 2.1mb. I also took 5 shots where the image was saved in highest quality (2560X1920) TIFF mode. These images were 15.1mb each. Some were take with flash, some without. I timed how long it took from the time I pushes the button to take an image to the point where the camera stopped saving the image to the flash card in the camera. The C50 has a card access indicator on the back of the camera which blinks red when the xD card is being accessed. Typically the access indicator starts blinking less than a second after the shutter button is pushed, and stops when the camera is ready to use again and writing to the card has stopped.

The jpg images appeared to take from 3.8 to 4.2 seconds to write to the card in the digital camera. I "guesstimated" that about 1/2 second elapsed from the time I pushed the shutter button till the red "card access" light started blinking, indicating about 3.5 seconds were required to write the image to the xD card in my camera, an average write speed of about 0.6mb/sec. I tried this test with both a 32 mb xD card, and the supposedly faster 256mb card, but the times were about the same in each case. The 15.1mb TIFF images appeared to take about 22 seconds to write to the xD card in my camera, indicating a write speed of about 0.7mb/sec, consistent with the write speeds of the small jpeg image files. These mediocre write speeds are very noticeable when you want to take several images quickly.

Since these write speeds were much slower than expected, I also tested write speeds using a Lexar Media Hi-Speed (usb2) capable flash card reader/writer, connected to a USB2 port on my Dell 4550 PC. I was able to save a 76mb video file to the 256mb xD card in 104 seconds, for a average write speed of 0.73mb per second (admittedly this was about 10 seconds faster than I could save the same file to a Sandisk Compactflash card using the same reader). 40mb worth of 50 jpeg image files took almost 4 minutes to save to the card, a speed so slow I can't explain it. 211mb worth of mp3 files took 13 minutes to save to the xD card.

Read speeds from the xD card were much faster than write speeds, typically about 2.2-2.5mb/second using the Lexar card reader (fast enough to exceed typical usb1 speeds at least).

I don't have enough hardware to thoroughly test xD card read/write speeds. However if Fuji/Olympus claims about xD cards being faster than other flash memory types are true, it at least appears that the speed advantage isn't being used effectively in today's generation of digital camera's and card readers.

Conclusion

If you're trying to decide to buy an Olympus xD card vs another brand, choose the Olympus card if you like the Panorama feature. Otherwise make price your top consideration, but don't have any concerns about the Olympus cards, they appear to be well made and should last a long time. If you're trying to choose between xD vs a different type of media, choose carefully, the real advantages of xD cards appear to be small.

Fuji and Olympus have developed a new type of flash memory that obviously allows smaller cameras to be built, but the other supposed advantages don't seem to be benefitting users, at least yet. The difference in size between xD and SD cards isn't big enough to warrant this new technology on size alone. Read/write speeds are no faster than other types of flash memory and xD cards are currently at least as expensive, and often higher priced than SD, Compactflash or Smartmedia. xD cards do appear to be sturdy and long lasting. The Olympus Panorama feature is nice, but not a "must have" feature, and was also available with their line of Smartmedia cards. My guess is that these controllerless xD cards are cheaper to manufacture than SD cards, leading to higher profit margins for Fuji and Olympus short term, but hopefully, affordable multigigabyte sized xD cards a couple of years from now. Unfortunately, since the card's controllers are built into the camera, instead of the card (like SD and Compactflash cards, for example), your camera may need a firmware upgrade before it will be able to use the larger xD cards sure to be released. If you're buying a new digital camera, choosing an xD capable model won't be a bad choice, but if you're hoping to see advantages, such as faster image write speeds, when compared to your current compactflash or SD capable camera, you'll likely be disappointed.