September 1999, Issue 110

Get Smart Media—(Part 1):
What's It All About?

SAY CHEESE

Documenting family life has been a popular pastime for many Americans. Still photography progressed through 8-mm home movies and camcorders.

Now the circle is complete. The digital still camera has finally developed to the point where it can begin to compete with film.

High-resolution picture files can easily top a megabyte in size. I don’t know about you, but the nonvolatile memory I’ve been familiar with is expensive and bulky. What’s happened?

Except for some Kodak’s digital cameras that use 3½¢ floppy disks for file storage, the format of choice for digital cameras is SmartMedia. Even if you’ve seen SmartMedia, you probably haven’t given it much thought (and that’s how it should be).

Although I balk at taking a screwdriver to my Toshiba PDR-M1, I’ve become curious about this new media. Actually, I’m more curious about the format of the media than the media itself. Lots of distributors are selling it, but there doesn’t seem to be much information available.