Memory Cards for Digital Cameras - Memory Sticks

Memory Stick was developed by Sony in October 1998 for their CyberShot digital cameras and other Sony electronic devices. In fact, Memory Stick is only compatible with Sony digital cameras, with the exception of very few other cameras.

If you're looking to change to another brand of camera, chances are that your Memory Stick will not work with the new camera. Memory Stick are useful however, if you are a fan of Sony electronics. Sony devices, such as MP3 players, PDA's, are all using Memory Stick as their storage media.

Capacity

The original Memory Stick is available in capacities from 4MB up to 256 MB. However, the original Memory Stick is no longer in production. Newer Memory Stick variants include Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick Micro (M2) and the latest Memory Stick XC.

The Memory Stick PRO introduced in 2003 offers memory space up to 4 GBs, and is backwards compatible with older devices.

The Memory Stick Duo was developed due to the need for smaller memory cards in increasing smaller digital cameras. The Memory Stick Duo was only two-third the size of the original Memory Stick and smaller than competing SD memory cards.

However, Memory Stick Duo capacity was limited to only 128 MB. To solve this problem, the Memory Stick Duo and the Memory Stick PRO was integrated to form the Memory Stick PRO Duo which combines the small size of the Duo with the high capacity of the PRO.

The Memory Stick Micro was a further enhancement to the size reduction of the DUO, achieving half the size of DUO and up to 16 GB of memory storage.

The latest Memory Stick XC introduced in 2009 has a maximum capacity of 2 TB, a 6000% jump from the next highest capacity of 32 GB.

Transfer Speed

The original Memory Stick had a slow transfer speed of up to 2 MB/s, but the newer Memory Stick PRO and PRO Duo come with a high speed mode with allows transfers of up to 20 MB/s. In fact, all Memory Sticks with capacity greater than 1 GB of capacity are able to support the high speed feature.

The fastest transfer speed on the Memory Stick series is the Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo. It supports the Memory Stick PRO format and has a theoretical transfer rate of 60 MB/s, three times higher than the previous technology.

Compatibility

Memory Sticks are only compatible with Sony electronic devices. Even among Sony devices, not all will be able to accommodate every single Memory Stick format. While sizes difference compatibility can always be resolved using a simple adaptor (since the electronic architecture is uniform across Memory Sticks) some Sony devices does not make use of the Memory Stick format. However, all Sony digital cameras are known to be compatible with Memory Stick.

Newer Sony devices have no problems reading new memory sticks for digital cameras like the PRO Duo or XC and they are all backwards compatible with older Memory Sticks. However, old devices that do not make use of FAT 32 or exFAT file systems are unable to use Memory Sticks with more than 4 GB of capacity.

Memory Sticks tend to be ahead of their competition in terms of their capacity, but they are also highly exclusive to Sony products. Memory Sticks are also usually more expensive than their competition.  But if you are using a Sony camera, Memory Sticks are 100% guaranteed to work well for you.