Nuggets: Sony hopes to set standard with Memory Stick

Forget the queue in Boots, dash off your holiday snaps with Sony

Sony says that it wants to establish Memory Stick, its new recordable IC memory card, as a new standard for data exchange. Trouble is, for all its trumpeted advantages because it's a proprietary format you can't actually use it in much at the moment.

It's probably a fairly safe assumption therefore that we're going to be seeing a lot of shiny new kit rolling out of Sony central in the next few months. The DPP-MS300 Digital Photo Printer is in the vanguard of this expected product avalanche. Similar to efforts by Fujifilm and Lexmark, among others, the printer lets you dash off photo prints of images taken on a digital camera or camcorder. To download images for printing you simply shove your Memory Stick into the special slot. Which all sound rather lovely.

Bear in mind however that the only camera in the world that actually takes the Memory Stick is Sony's new Cybershot -- details of which are coming up on Nuggets later this week.

Realising that the world's not going to switch to the Memory Stick format overnight, Sony has also added a PC card slot to let you print from the ever so slightly more common Compact Flash and Smart Media cards. It's also got a video still image capture function, so you can also print out images stores on a digital camcorder. Available now for £595.

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