This announcement may be the first notice of higher capacity SmartMedia memory, so it would heighten the competition with CF. I believe I have read somewhere, much earlier, or perhaps heard comments of Harari that certain features of the SmartMedia design use SanDisk proprietary technology. Maybe that's why Olympus, in its highest resolution camera just coming on the market now, still uses the SmartMedia card, though it has an extra slot for CF.
As more and more capital and engineering effort goes into higher capacity cards, what would be interesting to me is to monitor any advances in read/write speeds. For example, when I take the highest resolution photo on my Nikon 950, there is a delay of about 15 - 20 seconds while the image is written to the flash memory. During that waiting period, all you see in the display window is a blurred image of the photo with an hourglass symbol indicating that the write procedure is taking place. You can't take any more photos until the procedure is completed. Using the lower resolution, compressed JPEG format, the write process takes only a few seconds.
A faster read/write process would give any high resolution camera a competitive edge, so it remains to be seen whether the Samsung developments will have an influence here. It should also be noted that Samsung attempted to get around SNDK patents a few years ago, resulting in the Commerce Department threatening to ban imports of Samsung flash memories and accompanying cameras until the matter was resolved in SanDisk's favor.
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