Comments on: Info on Memory Stick Licencing Fees Available

Just trying the keep the facts straight.

Hats off to open-media formats like SD. I think we've all seen Sony's strong-arm media tactics in the past (CDROM) & Music. Let's hope this one falls on its face (Mini-Disc).

My Aiwa stereo player which I got this summer while I was in Japan have a MS slot in it. Acer's S10, a Palm OS based PDA, has a MS slot. - somthing for you to think about before you make another un-educated statment.

SD is not an "open" standard. It's owned by three companies: Panasonic (Matsushita), Toshiba, and Sandisk, exactly the same way the Memory Stick is owned by Sony. They get no "real" input into how it works. Using the SD format costs $1000/yr, which isn't exactly pocket change either -- in the same ballpark as MS.

Here's the list of SD member companies. A member company is defined as someone who pays SD to license their products. http://www.sdcard.org/member.htm

Here's the list of MS member companies. Note the page is nearly identical in wording and such. All they do is pay Sony to develop MS products. http://www.memorystick.org/msinfo/eng/memberlist/index.html

CompactFlash costs no money to license. It's the only "real" open format. SD and MS are for-profit formats. Outside of the PDA industry MS has MUCH higher marketshare. The only company (outside the PDA industry, which for some reason has embraced SD) that has made product lines based around SD is Panasonic, which owns SD just like Sony owns MS.

Pioneer is starting to make CD players that use MS for MP3's. Samsung is making DVD players that can read MS for pictures and audio.

In my opinion, SD is a completely worthless format except for its size. Proprietary security standards, jacked up prices (it is NOT comparable to memory stick, even on Ebay or pricegrabber), very few possibilities for peripherals. Since the Duo is about the same size, I hope SD dies quickly once people realize the "Secure" part of it is worthless. Even Hewlett-Packard, which uses SD on their PDA's, just added Memory Stick to their photo printers but not SD. SD is only used on PDA's because of their size.

Personally, I like Compact Flash the most, but Memory Stick is second best in my book. It even has 2x or better transfer rate compared to SD and others.

But I said all this on Brighthand already. :(

Sure, if you exclude companies like Kodak who are using it in their digital cameras, and completely ignore devices that use MMC cards.

> It even has 2x or better transfer rate compared to SD and others.

As far as I know, the max speed in the spec for SD is way beyond Memory Stick.

Research YOUR information!!!

2) If you "join" the SD card association, that $4k does NOT entitle you to make products, you have to pay the extra licensing fee. ALL LICENSEES of MS get to attend meetings and receive publications, so all you've proven is that it's actually more expensive to license SD if you want actual support. As for "voting," worthless. The SD spec was designed by Panasonic, Toshiba, and SanDisk. It's pretty ridiculous that I could pay $1k and be on a "board of directors."

3) Kodak does NOT use SD cards on its cameras. It uses CompactFlash on nearly all of them. I believe they experimented with SD cards on one of their cameras.. maybe more, I don't know. Definitely not their standard though. Go to kodak.com and see.

4) SD is still far more expensive than MS, and always will be. SD is based around "Secure" formatting which is a joke, since consumers clearly don't want "secure" formats right now. Just like nobody smart is buying Sony's MagicGate sticks. More expensive, no real benefit.

5) MMC and SD are not the same thing; older flash MP3 players sometimes used MMC, but not many. It's even relatively hard to find MMC cards now. Flash based players are dying; all of the top selling MP3 Players on zdnet.com, except one (strangely enough the iPaq), are CD- or hard drive-based players.

Completely WRONG. Companies like Palm actively participate in the SDA to develop things like the SDIO sepcs.

> Kodak does NOT use SD cards on its cameras.

Absolutlely WRONG. Even though you try to back out of it in the statements that follow.

All of the SD specs were created BEFORE palm made their first expansion slot. Since you're so vague I can't tell if you mean that member companies decide how the SD format is made (which is 100% false) or whether they are an active participant in making IO devices. If so, the same is true with memory sticks.

Ridiculous. If Sony called the memory stick the "Open Flash-Based Stick Association of Cooperatives" and never marketed it as the "Sony Memory Stick," tards like yourself would love memory stick because of its "openness."

Defending SD because of its size: Great, I agree with you. Defending SD because it's an "open format": Retarded.

Sorry for the flame innocent readers; it's just that when you go to lengths to try to show people that their assumptions are wrong and somebody replies and says "nuh uh, you're wrong," it's very annoying.

Are you a complete idiot or do you aspire to be one every waking moment of your life? Those numbers are for transfer rates between the chip controller and the memory on the card, NOT from device to card. Line 1, Line 2, Line 3, Line 4 are for developers and have no impact on how the end-user experiences data transfer from card to device. You have completely and emphatically underscored my request: DO YOUR F***ING RESEARCH. Are you an enginner? If not, then shut the hell up!!! If you are, then you're a pathetic representative.

To use your words against you:

"Quit posting crap you don't know anything about, and especially quit accusing people of lying when info you are posting is flat out wrong."

http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?DPNo=977156

Price for an m505 from the same source £300, and a 64Mb SD card at £75, or £47 for a MMC.

I also grabbed a 16Mb MS for software, at £25, a SD is also £25, and a 16Mb MMC £20.

I love the m505 form factor, and everything Palm has done for this business, but Sony are better value IMHO.

Interestingly the PalmOS 5 presentation at PalmSource is a joint Sony and Palm event, according to a recent webcast.

Take a look at http://makeashorterlink.com/?G1D55165
and you will see how seriously Sony is taking this business.

I like this quote from the "Sony: Delivering on a promise seminar"

'Finally, new advances in the CLIÉ™ Handheld platform and expansion technology will be shown.'

My fingers are already itching.

It's readily apparent by the previous post that the author has little understanding of Betamax and Memory Stick, for that matter. Betamax is STILL AROUND!!! It is the preferred method of recording and playback for all the broadcast companies because of its superior quality. Sure an individual consumer may not use it, but to assume that Betamax is no more is to assume wrong.

Also, Sony is the company that created the 3.5" floppy disk and contributed to the CD-ROM, so why is it so hard to believe that their Memory Stick won't be just as ubiquitous?

And research shows that Memory STick commands 26% of the flash memory market. SD/MMC have less than 1% (NPD Intelect from recent CNET article). Granted, Compact Flash still has the lion share of the market, but with devices getting smaller and smaller, you'll see those numbers declining as manufacturers will need to migrate to a smaller format (Let's hope it's SD). But unless SD really does something to boost those numbers, I'm feeling that MS could win out.

Hey come on, all new products (desktop, CD-RW drive, mouse, video cams, dv cams, digital cams) that Sony is releasing now has a Memory Stick slot. For me, it is already a 'convenience' using the memory stick!

I think the betastick comment is pointless. I don't see the universal acceptance of a single memory card format for some time. As it is, all the people I know that have digital devices use different media, CF, Smart Media, etc.

Maybe the MS will become like 3.5" disks, maybe it will be like the Minidisc (which still seems to be the portable music format of choice with people I know). Maybe the closed nature of the format will hold it back, maybe it will mean that it won't take 9 months to "agree I/O standards".

What gets me is why it matters to so much to certain people that it fails.

Freedon of choice and speech and so on....get the picture?

Toshiba, Sharp and a bunch of other lesser known brands do. Oh, of course Panasonic.

SD cards will fit completely inside of a CF adapter card, too. So there it won't be sticking out of notebooks like some ThinkPads that have gone to CF for one of the slots.

>Sony, one of the biggest laptop makers in America, has MS slots.

For some reason that doesn't surprise me. Problem is they are stubborn and won't add other slots until it is probably too late.

>HP's popular line of Photosmart printers/readers read MS, not SD.

Not the one I own. Must be the more expensive model. Hey, those slots aren't free. But since it does have a CF slot it is a non-issue.

By the way, read the Sony support site and you will see that some 'white' Memory Sticks 'may' not work... whatever that means. They recommend you copy to a computer and print that way.

HP is a board member of the SD Card Association.
http://www.sdcard.org/member.htm

>Mini DVD players from Samsung read MS, not SD.

I probably won't be buying one of those. <g> For what it is worth, Samsung is also a board member.

Seems like Sony against the world to me. Don't want to be seen as bashing them. It's just that I can't see where MS will fit in a few years from now. Let's hope SanDisk and Lexar can help them out with their "Next Generation Memory Stick".

If ubiquitous-ness means essentially only on Sony devices. SD is on Palms, HandEras, Pocket PC, and Linux devices; on Kodak and Panasonic digital cameras, and in various branded MP3 players.

> No, it's not "open" but neither is SD (at least not in
> the GNU/Linux sense), it still costs money to get a
> position in the SD decision-making board.

Open has little to do with money, even in the GNU/Linux sense. If you look at how much these licenses/memberships cost and add up the numbers, there's probably barely enough money pay a few tech people, the people that manage the documents, lawyers, and office space. It does have a lot to do with if Palm or whoever wants to contribute to the spec, the opportunity is there.

I hate to tell you this, but you are the one who sounds "militant".

Anyhow, this is a handheld related board and practically all the new handhelds from manufacturers other than Sony are using SD. Outside of Japan and maybe China, essentially no manufaturuers are showing interest in using Memory Stick for media in other products either. I see no reason for those tendencies to change in the future.

I wasn't the one who made the Betamax comment. Anyhow, at least Betamax was a better format.