Smart Media

Not sure if anyone will be able to answer this but rather than registering on a Fuji forum thought I'd ask here.
Considering buying an elderly Fuji Finpix 9600zoom for my kids to mess about with. It is going very cheap due to......only taking Smart Media cards. I have a 64Mb and a couple of 32Mb cards but they won't hold many images. Does anyone have any experience of using a Smart Media to xD converter in a camera. And also any idea where I can get cheap (£10 or less) 128Mb smart media cards.
Cheers
Donut

http://www.7dayshop.com/

G

The Fuji Finepix 9600 takes CompactFlash and xD cards.

and it's a great 'little' camera. I still carry mine if I'm travelling light or want to force myself not to keep stopping to change lenses...and it's bloody handy being able to take video and super close (pseudo) macro (without bending down), 'bit (image) noisy, bit slow but who cares about the memory cards?

Unfortunately this was a 9600zoom - an older model that only takes Smart Media - if it took anything else I'd have snapped it up for the £50 they were asking. But with a limit of 128Mb Smart Media I couldn't justify it - even if I could find cheap cards (which I can't) they only hold a handful of images at the highest quality. Shame as this is a smashing camera by all accounts.
Donut

A friend's son inherited a camera taking SmartMedia cards and had the same problem. Eventually I found someone selling a camera that had 6 cards with it, four of them being 128MB. This only cost me £20 for the package, so it's worth keeping your eyes open.

I'll keep an eye open but with the 128Mb cards only holding 8 images at the highest quality I still feel it may be a limitation - maybe I don't need to use the highest quality
Cheers
Donut

I think you'll find the camera you've bought has a 3.2MP sensor, meaning that even the highest quality JPEG's should come in at around 1-1.5MB each. Therefore, a 128MB card should fit an average of 80-120 images on it at the highest quality - more than enough I reckon!

Could somebody please give me a link to this camera as I can only think of the 6900 that fits this spec.My google skills have deserted me.Many thanks.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/FinePix-6900-Digital-Camera-6xOptical/dp/B00005N9ML

is the link I found
It mentioned that the user only got 1 high quality image on a 16Mb card. I think this is because of the way the Fuji images are created - although the sensor is 3Mb the images are equivalent to 6Mb - I think a few Fuji cameras do this.
I didn't buy the camera due to the smar media issue.....sorry I thought I made that clear.
Donut

It's true that Fuji have strange methods of calculating the megapixel outputs of their cameras (because of the uniquely patterned sensors they employ) so it's not uncommon to see a 3.2 megapixel Fuji being described as having 6.4 megapixels. Having said that I use a Contax TVS as my pocket digicam which has a 5 megapixel resolution and is permanently left at the highest quality JPEG setting; looking through a recent folder of pictures I see that the file sizes vary between 1.7 and 2.3MB so at a worst-case scenario I still fit 55 pictures onto a 128MB card - I'd be stunned if the Fuji fared any worse than this!

It's a shame you didn't buy it - they were very good cameras and I reckon your 128MB of storage would have held at least as many shots as two rolls of film (probably a lot more) back in the pre-digital days...