A Different Perspective

We started out as a review site, keen to show all the technical ins- and outs of the products that were sent to us. That’s fine when a technology is new and attracts predominantly the technically-minded but when products such as memory cards have well and truly been a mainstream commodity for quite some time, there is not a great deal to be gained from exhaustive reviews that will show some differences of course but not really significant ones. We’ve done our own testing in the past and read countless other comparative reviews. We’re becoming convinced that – unless there is a specific need for absolutely the ultimate in performance – price has a far greater influence on the buying decision than anything else. Of course, there are differences in performance. Sometimes, there are differences in reliability because of the technology or controller used. But always we come across the issue of price. New technology can command prices that only few can afford. MMC and SD cards are not in this category even though the technology used in them and to manufacture them is constantly improving. Reduced Size (RS-MMC) and Mini SD cards may be relatively new formats but is radically new technology involved here? We’ll have a look at these cards in a moment.

On our desk are the following samples:

    * SanDisk 1GB SD 
    * ATP 1GB MMC
    * ATP 1GB SD
    * ATP 256 mini SD
    * ATP 256 RS MMC

Here’s a short description of these cards.

The SanDisk SD card – the world’s first one-gigabyter in production – demanded a cool $500 when it came out earlier this year. A few months ago it officially carried a $350 price tag and now street pricing covers the whole range all the way down to the incredible sub-$100 level! New in this card is the stackable packaging technology which primarily was developed by Sharp. This low-cost and high-yield die-stacking process allows for cheaper and higher capacity flash cards. Already about a year ago the SD format became the most popular flash memory card in the US. Thousands of products use the ubiquitous SD card now so SanDisk’s latest entries will have an eager market. Expect SanDisk to stay the market leader it has become with its ambitious plans for the novice-friendly Shoot & Store cards that will be available just everywhere. We can see that, next to sharp pricing, availability will be a big factor. If you can buy a “film card” at your corner store or news agent just as easily as you bought your Kodak film, a whole new market is opening up. Particularly when people start to use these cards as photography albums, having a box full of them… SanDisk’s latest announcement offers 32MB cards for just 10 bucks. And I read this a day after hearing on the news that Kodak Australia will close its plant here with the loss of 600 jobs. Sign of the (digital) times, I reckon. Before we move on to the ATP samples which include the even smaller Reduced Size MMC and Mini SD cards, let me emphasise that SanDisk also produce a whole line-up of various small format cards, including the TransFlash which is used by Motorola in their 3G phones. They even make combo cards like the Wi-Fi SD combined with a decent 256MB.