The Types of Olympus XD Cards

• XD cards are used in digital cameras to save still and video images.Creative Crop/Digital Vision/Getty Images
  
  While digital cameras are first and foremost cameras, in some ways they are also computers. And just like computers, digital cameras need a memory source to save their images to. Digital cameras either have an internal memory chip where images are stored then downloaded to your computer, or they are saved on a removable memory card like Olympus xD cards.
  
  

XD-M and M+ Cards

• First released in 2005, the original xD cards came in capacity sizes ranging from 16MB (megabytes) up to 512MB. As of June 2010, these cards are now offered in sizes ranging from 256MB up to 2GB (gigabytes). The cards can be used to record both still and video images. The main difference between the M and the M+ cards is their write speed (how quickly images are stored to the card) and their read speed (how quickly an image can be accessed on the card). The write speed for an M card is 2.5MB per second. The M+ card has a write speed of 3.75MB per second. The read speed for the two cards is 4MB per second for the M and 6MB per second for the M+.
  
  

Type H Cards

• Type H cards were also released in 2005 and offered greater data speed rates than the M cards. Type H cards were available in 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB sizes. The cards were taken out of production by Olympus as the company claimed they were too expensive to manufacture.
  
  

Future

• As of June 2010, Olympus started to move away from using xD cards as more and more cameras were being manufactured to use the smaller "microSD" cards.