I’m so used to SD, microSD and CFexpress cards as gold standard removable media for my digital camera of choice – not to mention wireless transfer – that it’s easy to forget about all the failed physical formats previously presented to data-hungry photographers.
If you’ve taken an image with a digital camera over the past 25 years, as I have, you’ll be familiar with a roll call of formats that were once the must-have, but have now disappeared, among them SmartMedia and xD cards – both favored by Fuji point-and-shoots – along with Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick and, for more serious users with larger cameras, CompactFlash. The latter gave way to CFexpress cards and the XQD format in the 2010s, just slightly thicker than a SD card but offering much faster speeds than CF.
