XD Picture Card is a type of flash memory memory card, for use mainly in digital cameras. xD stands for extreme Digital. The cards were introduced it to the market in July 2002 and developed by Olympus and Fujifilm. Toshiba Corporation and Samsung Electronics manufacture the cards for Olympus and Fujifilm. Other brands, including Kodak, SanDisk, and Lexar, now sell xD cards.
Advantages and Disadvantages using XD-Picutre Card
The xD format primarily competes with formats such as Secure Digital card (SD), CompactFlash (CF), and Sony's Memory Stick.
Advantages
* xD cards are fast in comparison with older formats such as SmartMedia (SM), MultiMediaCard (MMC), and MemoryStick (MS).
* xD cards have a small form-factor in comparison with other formats.
* xD cards have a low power consumption.
Disadvantages
* xD cards have a fairly small theoretical maximum capacity in comparison with other formats.
* xD cards are much slower than their main competitor, SecureDigital (SD).
* xD cards are generally more expensive than cards of other formats.
* xD cards are less widely supported than many other formats, both by camera, reader and accessory manufacturers.
* xD cards are so small that they can be harder to handle for some people, and risk being misplaced more easily than larger format cards.
* xD card is a proprietary format only used by Fujifilm and Olympus, much like the Memory Stick card is with Sony. This means that no public documentation or implementation is available. Compare this to the somewhat open SD, or the completely open CompactFlash standard.