I was given a multi-function camera for my birthday, so I've been playing with it. So far, it seems adequate for my needs and fairly simple to use.

It comes with 16 mb built in, but you can add either SD or MMC cards for up to 2 gb additional storage.

Is there any reason why I should choose one over the other? I have no other devices (as yet) that uses these things, so it's pretty much up in the air right now.

Any advice appreciated.

SD (Secure Digital) and MMC (Multi-Media Card) are the same physical format, if I remember right. The difference is that SD has some bits that allow for copy control in certain devices (which doesn't apply to cameras).

All I ever see in stores now are SD cards (and in fact, asking your average Best Buy drone about MMC may net you a deer-in-the-headlights look), so just get that.

For best results make sure you get a high-speed one, like Sandisk Extreme II, III, IV or Lexar's equivalent. Not much of a price premium to make sure you get a good card if you shop around.

Sandisk over Lexar, IMO.

Sandisk is essentially a fabless company contracting out the wafer jobs to several foundry companies. Lexar was in basically the same situation until Micron bought them a few years ago. Now they should be mostly Micron chips inside.

Newer SD cards are speed rated. A Class 6 is 6Mb write speed and Class 4 4Mb and so on. Other names such as Extreme, Speedy are branding without regard to the real specification of the product.

Sandisk owns a lot of the patents in SD. So when you buy a SD card, certain royalty will go to Sandisk. Nokia is the real force behind MMC but I don't know if they collect Royalty. As was said the MMC volume shipped are very small anyway.

Most large volume SD card (NAND flash chip) designs produce similar performance and reliability. The largest manufacturers are Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Micron etc. That is not to say that some product don't get shipped unmarked and untested and wound up in the reatil market somewhere with nice packaging and catchy name.

SD cards are also slightly thicker than MMC cards.

From what BigLar has said, he should not need an SDHC card (which is what a lot of the newer cards are), thus most cards 2GB and under should be fine.

Personally, I prefer Lexar Media - I've always been happy with the performance and support of the higher end modules (That and the recovery software they throw in normally sells it totally for me).

If you choose to take advantage of the higher speed modules, bear in mind that your camera may not be able to use the card to the full speed available. You'll find it quick to copy the images over from camera to PC with a card reader though.

At the 512mb/1GB/2GB level, there isn't much to different each other except at the super high speeds, and memory at these capacities is cheap enough. I would avoid buying from eBay as some of the memory you get from there may be the sub-rated stuff and could expire sooner than properly brought stuff.

Hope that helps.

I've owned loads of SD cards in my life, and the only ones that ever died were from Sandisk. Just my 2 cents.