Bill asked:
... Need information... purchased a used Olympus D600L digital - -
another bad eBoo story. Acquired just to create auction photos.
Olympus literature cites use of a [SmartMedia] 4 MB card with 8 MB being
an option.
... My guess is that at the time of design, 8 MB cards were the largest
available. Today, 16 MB cards are actually cheaper. Will the 16 MB
card function, including formatting, in this camera????
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Can't say for sure Bill but the user's guide for the 620L which is on
Oly's web site says that the 620L will support 16MB.
Whether CF or SmartMedia these devices try to emulate an ATA/IDE disk
drive. The difference between the two is that the drive controller for
SM resides in the camera whereas the controller for CF resides on each
individual CF card. An SM camera is therefore technologically limited
to whatever the onboard controller was designed to do for that
particular camera. A CF capable camera gets automatically smarter
whenever you plug in a new and larger CF card.
Looking for further rationale of what is likely supported I look for
"magic numbers"; ie, some engineering breakpoint in the design. For a
PC/DOS FAT formatted disk a logical limit is the number of storage
allocation units (sectors) that can be specified in a positive 16 bit
integer = 32,768. The other limit is the size of the data sector which,
for all practical purposes, is always 512 bytes. Multiplying these two
together yields 16,777,216 or 16MB. To get larger than 16MB would
require changing the size of the sector (not likely) or linking multiple
sectors together into larger storage allocation units called clusters.
This also would probably not be done at a time when the largest card was
2 or 4MB.
So 16MB is a logical design break point for a SM controller and I would
feel comfortable guessing that the 600 can handle an SM card that large.
Of course, if somebody else knows for sure that's even better :-)
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
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