UKC

Long shot but does anyone have a Smart Media card they want to get rid of to someone who will use it? 
Smart Media was a digital storage format for early consumer digital cameras in the mid-late 1990s that quickly became obsolete around 2001 as Compact Flash and SD dominated. They were very thin which possibly limited their capacity, which was in turn the death knell, really - I think they maxed out at 128Mb. 
I recently purchased a quirky little 1999 camera, the Sharp VN-EZ1(*), which uses these cards. There was no card with it so I have spent £18 (!) on a 128Mb one, and it comes up as "Card Error" on the camera. It is seen perfectly fine on my Mac and Windows computers via a card reader, there were someone's old photos on it, I deleted those and then tried reformatting the card to, well, everything. exFAT, NTFS etc. No joy in camera. And I can't see a way to format in-camera partly because all the menus are stuck in an Oriental language! I wonder if the camera can't handle a 128Mb card (specification says "up to 32Mb") but at this stage I am loath to throw more money at this thing.... just interested to see if a lower capacity card might work

* amazingly, Sharp's website still hosts what must be the original pages for this camera. Relish that font, layout, and concern over users not being able to play back video files ...and in fact explaining why digital video files are nice and interesting things! https://global.sharp/inet-viewcam/text/features.html 

I wonder whether you can somehow reformat the card you currently have so that it presents as a 32MB filesystem, rather than a 128MB one?

You want FAT for that sized card.  What do you plan to do with your webcam or should we not ask?

ha ! I am simply an innocent collector of retro inefficiency

Think I've got one in the bottom of a drawer somewhere - they were pretty bendy if I remember. I'll dig around tomorrow and drop you a DM if I find one that's 32Mb or less.

thanks Chris. It’s all a nostalgic lo fi thing that won’t amount to much of course . looking back, this camera was around £450 25 years ago, and you’d be appalled with its capabilities on the most low end non branded £80 phone these days. But that’s of course not the point 😃

Good news, I've found two Smart Media cards.

Bad news, one is 64Mb, the other is 128Mb.

If you want to try anyway, DM me your address and I'll drop them in the post, they're only gathering dust here.

Thanks Chris, DM sent, just posting here in case it ends up in your spam folder!

Had you same problem with cards, limit was 4GB. There was a micro-SD card holder, but where do you get a 4GB micro-SD card? Lots of searching in shops.

Hi Chris, cards arrived and the 64Mb works! Not the 128Mb

I’ll send you a DM 

As suggested already, format the 128MB as 64MB or less.

thanks and sorry for apparently ignoring it before! I was too embarrassed to admit that I did not know how to do that. How is this done? I only understand the format format options (NTFS, exFAT etc). I say “understand”. I mean “see” 😀

seems, from Frank’s post , that I have to pull my finger out and see how to do this 

The modern default is FAT64. There should be a "FAT16" or hopefully even smaller. Limits the size of the card.

FAT16 ~2GB

In this case smaller is better. So FAT8 should be 16MB, if my thoughts are right.