Effectively the format war has turned in SD-Card's favor. Since 2010, new products of Sony (previously only using Memory Stick) and Olympus (previously only using XD-Card) have been offered with an additional SD-Card slot. All three concepts became obsolete once flash memory prices became lower and capacities became higher. Initially memory cards were expensive, costing US$3 per megabyte of capacity in 2001 this led to the development of the Microdrive, PocketZip and Dataplay.

In industrial and embedded fields, even the venerable PC card (PCMCIA) memory cards still manage to maintain a niche, while in mobile phones and PDAs, the memory card has become smaller. By 2005 however, SD/MMC had nearly taken over SmartMedia's spot, though not to the same level and with stiff competition coming from Memory Stick variants, as well as CompactFlash. In 2001, SM alone captured 50% of the digital camera market and CF had captured the professional digital camera market. The desire for smaller cards for cell-phones, PDAs, and compact digital cameras drove a trend that left the previous generation of 'compact' cards looking big. The first one was CompactFlash and later SmartMedia and Miniature Card. Since 1994, a number of memory card formats smaller than the PC Card arrived. PC Cards (PCMCIA) were the first commercial memory card formats (type I cards) to come out, but are now mainly used in industrial applications and to connect I/O devices such as modems. It was invented by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in 1980 and commercialized by Toshiba in 1987. The basis for memory card technology is flash memory. 2 Data table of selected memory card formats.

Usb p2 card reader