Previously, xD competed primarily with Secure Digital (SD) cards, CompactFlash (CF), and Sony's Memory Stick.

Olympus began to move away from the xD format with the mid-2009[3] announcement of the E-P1 camera, which supported only Secure Digital memory cards.

Amazon Best Sellers in xD-Picture Cards reports no products offered with a Date First Available since 4 August 2009.

The Type M card, released in February 2005,[13] uses multi-level cell (MLC) architecture to achieve a theoretical storage capacity of up to 8 GB.

Type H and M+ cards however, are required in newer models to capture video at high rate (640×480 @ 30fps).

In both cases, the computer sees the card as a mass storage device containing image files, although software or firmware can alter this representation.

They normally hide the portion of the memory which stores this information (among other things) from higher level access.

These readers have been reverse-engineered and Linux drivers have been produced by the Alauda Project,[21] which has documented the on-chip data structures of the xD card.

At the raw hardware level, an xD card is simply an ordinary NAND flash integrated circuit in an unusual package.

xD and SmartMedia cards can be used by hobbyists as a convenient source of NAND flash memory chips for custom projects.

Unsubtantiated reports claim that some cameras such as the E-450 only support panoramic processing when using Olympus branded xD cards.