SD = No Future Compatibility Security?

Recently, Kodak sent me a review unit of their high-end EasyShare P880 point-and-shoot digicam, to compare against both my beloved DX7590 point-and-shoot and against my Pentax *istD digital SLRs. I had a variety of 1 GByte-and-smaller SD cards already in inventory, and Kingston and Patriot Memory further bolstered my flash memory arsenal with, respectively, 2 GByte and 4 GByte cards.

I’ve discovered several troubling incompatibilities while doing my limited thus-far testing. My Dell Inspiron 700m laptop contains a built-in SD card reader, but I’ve been unable to successfully access cards higher than 1 GByte in capacity with it. Web surfing reveals that this is a known problem, and the currently-available software hacks leave some users’ systems unable to enter (and/or exit) standby and hibernation mode, etc. I’m encouraged that a driver upgrade appears to be all that’s necessary to get the PCIxx20 Texas Instruments chip inside the 700m working with high-capacity cards, and I hope Dell provides an official update soon. Until then, my nearly five-year-old Sandisk Cruzer portable SD card reader handles the high-capacity cards just fine, even the 4 GByte one (keep reading….).

I’ve also found that the P880 reports an invalid ‘memory full’ error message when I insert a blank 4 GByte SD card in it. 2 GByte-and-below cards work fine in the camera. From my casual past perusal of the Pentax user forums, I suspected I knew the answer before I explicitly went looking for it, and I was right; the recently-introduced SDHC format adds support for 4 GByte-and-above capacities. Yet, from Wikipidia’s explanation of the issue, I’m not sure of the root cause of my particular problem; is Kodak’s roughly year-old camera really not SDHC-cogniscent (I am, by the way, running the latest-and-greatest v1.02 firmware) or is Patriot’s design not fully SDHC-compliant?

This mess reminds me of the capacity-defined incompatibilities that used to plague SmartMedia cards, but whereas in that earlier case we were dealing with bare memory media that shifted the management burden completely on host-side silicon and software, SD cards contain integrated logic intelligence that should assist with the system-to-card compatibility bridge.

Folks, what’s the point of a standard that’s not really a standard?

Followup: Sandisk sent me a 4 GByte SDHC card, which just arrived. I popped it in the P880 and got a ‘this memory card is unusable’ error message in the display, even though my laptop (in conjunction with the MicroMate SD Card-to-USB adapter) reports it as a valid FAT32-formatted memory module. I’m not completely surprised at this result, since Sandisk’s SDHC compatibility list (PDF), last updated in October, doesn’t list this (or, for that matter, any) Kodak camera. I’d hoped Sandisk’s list was incomplete, though….the fact that a $400 (now, $600 at introduction), just over one-year-old digital camera that generates 8 Mpixel images seemingly custom-tailored for a high-capacity memory card doesn’t support that memory card is mind-blowing to me.

The fact that the SD Card Association forced this cumbersome SDHC conversion at 4 GBytes by not being sufficiently forwards-looking when it initially defined the SD Card standard is equally disappointing. And on that note, I realized after doing additional research that the Patriot card I earlier tried to use didn’t sport the obligatory SDHC logo; this recent Patriot press release also implies that the card currently in my possession isn’t completely SDHC compliant. If it took a geek like me this long to figure out what was going on, what will the typical consumer experience be? And by the way, Patriot, why isn’t one of the world’s largest digital camera manufacturers even listed on your SD Card compatibility page? Unbelievable….

Followup: Dell has released a driver upgrade for the Inspiron 700m that claims to support >1 GByte SD cards. I’ve confirmed that it works with 2 GByte and non-SDHC 4 GByte cards, but not with 4 GByte SDHC cards.