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Sony announced price reductions to its Memory Stick cards this week. The reductions affect both Memory Stick PRO and Memory Stick PRO Duo format cards.

Memory Stick is the third most popular flash memory format behind Secure Digital and CompactFlash. Memory Sticks are used by all Clie handhelds from Sony, which have been recently discontinued outside of Japan, as well as numerous other electronics devices, such as digital cameras, digital music players and smartphones, from Sony and a number of other manufacturers.

According to Sony, you can now buy 512 MB Memory Stick PRO cards (see top image) for $40 less than before, as the price has dropped to about $180. A 256 MB Memory Stick PRO card, at $90, now sells for about half the price of a 512 MB card. Memory Stick Pro cards go as high as 1 GB. Consumers can buy one of the 1 GB Memory Stick Pro cards for about $500.

Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, which are about a third the size of a standard-sized Memory Stick cards, now sell for about $300 for a 512 MB model, and $95 for a 256 MB model. These are, respectively, $50 and $10 price reductions. Memory Sitck Duo cards can be used in regular-sized Memory Stick slots with an adapter.


Memory Stick Duo

The Memory Stick PRO Duo cards feature high-speed data transfer, MagicGate security for the secure transfer of copyright-protected content and a write speed that allows for real-time recording of high-resolution images and video. It is designed to compete with other recent small format flash memory cards, such as miniSD and XD Picture cards.

Flash Memory Market

The Secure Digital memory card passed the CompactFlash card to take the top position in market share among removable flash memory formats last fall, according to the most recent sales data available from The NPD Group. The analyst firm said Secure Digital memory captured the number one position with 30% of the U.S. flash memory market in October against 28.8% for the CompactFlash Card. In third place, as mentioned at the top of this article, was Memory Stick, with a 22% market share.