Originally posted by: dolph
phil has a point: they could just sell them unformatted
Even if it were that simple (which it may be), they would probably just pay the licensing fee just to avoid pissing off all the dumbass customers out there.
Customer: You sold me a dead card!
Sandisk tech: You need to format it.
Customer: Format? What's that?
The licensing fees proposed by Microsoft do not seem unreasonable at all, a camera + 3 flash cards would be a whole $1 in licensing fees.
IMO though the licensing fees should be solely for the camera, not the media. Nobody pays MS licensing fees on a new hard drive, and nobody would because they don't necessarily have to use FAT - If they do use FAT they would have a (presumably) legal copy of Windows (obviously licensed to use FAT). Flash cards should be the same way, the licensing should be device specific, not media.
If the flash vendors insist on pre-formatting the cards then the above argument is obviously invalid.
Viper GTS