I have a Nomad 64 and an Olympus D-460 Zoom and I was hoping that the SmartMedia card from my mp3 player would work with the camera but it does not. Why is this?

What cards _are_ compatible for this camera besides Olympus brands? They're more expensive and I don't mind not having the panoramic feature. I just want a card that will work for certain!

-- Jessica (jessica.boyd@mankato.msus.edu), June 28, 2000

Answers

There are a couple of issues here. Any smartmedia should work in either device, but they format the cards differently. As a result of this, if you use a smartmedia in your MP3 player it won't work in your camera. Unfortunately, once the card is formatted for the MP3 player it's a bit difficult to reformat it. You can't just pop it in the camera and format it because the MP3 player apparently uses a different low level formatting system and destroys the low level format info that a camera expects to be present on the card in order for it to format the card.

However, if you have an external card reader or flashpath adapter (this might work through USB, but I doubt it), you can get a program off the web called "Dreaming of Brazil" that will let you reformat the card to work with a camera. Not only that, it's a FREEBIE! :-)

If you do a search on this forum for "dreaming of brazil" you'll probably find an older post where I told someone where to find it on the web. The only inconvenience is that you'll have to reformat it with the program every time you've used it in the MP3 player and then wish to use it in the camera. I wouldn't do this a lot because I'm not sure if there is any limit on how many times you can format the card? I'd guess it could be formatted as many as 10,000 times or as many times as the cards are rated for write cycles(10-100,000, I forget which), but it's really just a guess and could be less.

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), June 29, 2000.

Thank you for the reply, Gerald. :)

I did read some other posts about that but that program is made for the Diamond Rio and I have a Nomad. :( As far as I can see, there are no programs like this for the Nomad. I've heard some people say that they can basically use their Smartmedia cards for BOTH their digital camera and Nomad II -- I have the original Nomad 64, however.

I had a friend that had a Rio but he got rid of it and bought a Nomad too! Ugh! I don't know anyone with a Flashpath, Rio or anything now. Luckily, I only ruined an 8mb card. But now I'm completely unable to use my brand spankin' new camera until my new card comes in a few days. Hehe, it's rather amusing. I didn't even have the camera for an hour before I rendered it useless.

*slaps herself for not reading the manual more carefully*

Jess

-- Jessica (jessica.boyd@mankato.msus.edu), June 29, 2000.