The 'digital revolution' has meant different things to people in many walks of life. The photographer can now choose between a digital camera versus traditional film. Music lovers can now more easily carry around a variety of songs and share them with friends. Cell phones have increased in capabilities and storage. All of these innovations and more have meant that storage media has had to evolve along with the capabilities of these personal and professional devices. Two formats of digital storage media are Smart Media cards and MultiMedia Cards.
History
These two formats actually have different evolutions. Smart Media was one of the earlier developments in digital storage designed to compete with other storage options at the time. The MultiMedia Card (MMC) is actually the precursor to one of today's more popular formats, Secure Digital (SD), but MMC still has many users.
Smart Media
Smart Media was developed and released in 1995 by Toshiba as a hopeful successor to the floppy disk as it was the same size and shape and could fit into PC drives. Instead of the rotating floppy material, which can wear out and suffer mechanical breakdowns, solid state memory incorporating one or multiple memory chips lasts longer and offers larger storage capacity. Smart Media was popular with the early adopters of digital photography.
MultiMedia Card
MultiMedia Cards were developed and released in 1997 by SanDisk and Siemens AG with a much smaller package, being about the size of a postage stamp. One drive for this was that the same users that used Smart Media for digital photography were needing a smaller and faster format with more capacity for the new cameras that were coming out with higher resolution.
MMCs were also finding use in other devices such as music players, video game consoles, and mobile computers. Many computers have built-in slots to accept different media cards, which include MMC and SD formats. Also available are card readers that plug in to a USB port on the user's PC.
Considerations
Smart Media has a shortcoming in that it does not have an onboard controller and often, in order for a device to use the larger capacities that became available, would require firmware updates. In some cases updates where not available. Additionally, the data transfer rates were limited to that of the floppy disk format which could mean long waiting periods when copying larger files.
MMC as a format has enjoyed more innovations than the Smart Media card. With the advent of smaller personal devices there has been parallel development in smaller packaging known as Reduced-Size MultiMedia Card (RS-MMC), MMCplus, MMCmobile, MMCmicro, and MiCard. All these architectures are usable in standard MMC slots with the use of mechanical adapters. These developments are intended to keep MMC in competition with SD and its smaller formats.
Future
Smart Media Cards are no longer manufactured but are available from some retailers for those users who own legacy equipment.
With ongoing developments of technology being matched by MMC architecture design, there is likely to be continuing use of MMC for the foreseeable future.
Tags: Smart Media, developed released, digital photography, digital storage, floppy disk, MultiMedia Card
