Memory card in the context of Word processor (electronic device)

A digital video recorder (DVR), also referred to as a personal video recorder (PVR) particularly in Canadian and British English, is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes (STB) with direct to disk recording, portable media players and TV gateways with recording capability, and digital camcorders. Personal computers can be connected to video capture devices and used as DVRs; in such cases the application software used to record video is an integral part of the DVR. Many DVRs are classified as consumer electronic devices. Similar small devices with built-in (~5 inch diagonal) displays and SSD support may be used for professional film or video production, as these recorders often do not have the limitations that built-in recorders in cameras have, offering wider codec support, the removal of recording time limitations and higher bitrates.

An image scanner (often abbreviated to just scanner) is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting, or an object and converts it to a digital image. The most common type of scanner used in the home and the office is the flatbed scanner, where the document is placed on a glass bed. A sheetfed scanner, which moves the page across an image sensor using a series of rollers, may be used to scan one page of a document at a time or multiple pages, as in an automatic document feeder. A handheld scanner is a portable version of an image scanner that can be used on any flat surface. Scans are typically downloaded to the computer that the scanner is connected to, although some scanners are able to store scans on standalone flash media (e.g., memory cards and USB drives).

Modern scanners typically use a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a contact image sensor (CIS) as the image sensor, whereas drum scanners, developed earlier and still used for the highest possible image quality, use a photomultiplier tube (PMT) as the image sensor. Document cameras, which use commodity or specialized high-resolution cameras, photograph documents all at once.

In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term mass in mass storage is used to mean large in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drives, but it has also been used to mean large relative to the size of primary memory as for example with floppy disks on personal computers.

Devices and/or systems that have been described as mass storage include tape libraries, RAID systems, and a variety of computer drives such as hard disk drives (HDDs), magnetic tape drives, magneto-optical disc drives, optical disc drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs). It also includes experimental forms like holographic memory. Mass storage includes devices with removable and non-removable media. It does not include random access memory (RAM).

A flash memory controller (or flash controller) manages data stored on flash memory (usually NAND flash) and communicates with a computer or electronic device. Flash memory controllers can be designed for operating in low duty-cycle environments like memory cards, or other similar media for use in PDAs, mobile phones, etc. USB flash drives use flash memory controllers designed to communicate with personal computers through the USB port at a low duty-cycle. Flash controllers can also be designed for higher duty-cycle environments like solid-state drives (SSDs) used as data storage for laptop computer systems up to mission-critical enterprise storage arrays.

Sandisk Corporation (stylized as SanDisk, with the D capitalized in CamelCase) is an American multinational computer technology company based in Milpitas, California, that designs and manufactures flash memory products, including memory cards, USB flash drives, and solid-state drives. It was founded in 1988 as SunDisk by Eli Harari, Sanjay Mehrotra, and Jack Yuan. The name is a portmanteau of the founder’s name Sanjay and disk.

The company developed early flash storage technologies, including the first flash-based solid-state drive introduced in 1991. SunDisk changed its name to SanDisk in 1995 and subsequently held an initial public offering. In 2016, SanDisk was acquired by Western Digital. In 2025, Western Digital spun off its flash storage business as an independent public company under the Sandisk name.

The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage capacity and faster file transfer speeds; Memory Stick Duo, a small-form-factor version of the Memory Stick (including the PRO Duo); the even smaller Memory Stick Micro (M2), and the Memory Stick PRO-HG, a high speed variant of the PRO to be used in high-definition video and still cameras.

As a proprietary format, Sony exclusively used Memory Stick on its products in the 2000s such as Cyber-shot digital cameras, Handycam digital camcorders, Sony Ericsson mobile phones, WEGA and Bravia TV sets, VAIO PCs, digital audio players, and the PlayStation Portable game console, with the format being licensed to a few other companies early in its lifetime. With the increasing popularity of Secure Digital around 2010, Sony started to include SD in their devices, marking a surrender by Sony of its format war in the memory card business and the end to further serious development of the format. Despite this, Sony continues to support Memory Stick on certain newer devices through the use of adaptors.

In the history of video games, the 3rd generation of video game consoles, commonly referred to as the 8-bit era, began on July 15, 1983, with the Japanese release of two systems: Nintendo's Family Computer (commonly abbreviated to Famicom) and Sega's SG-1000. When the Famicom was released outside of Japan, it was remodeled and marketed as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This generation marked the end of the North American video game crash of 1983, and a shift in the dominance of home video game manufacturers from the United States to Japan. Handheld consoles were not a major part of this generation; the Game & Watch line from Nintendo (which started in 1980) and the Milton Bradley Microvision (which came out in 1979) that were sold at the time are both considered part of the previous generation due to hardware typical of the second generation.

Improvements in technology gave consoles of this generation improved graphical and sound capabilities, comparable to the golden age of arcade games. The number of simultaneous colors on screen and the palette size both increased which, along with larger resolutions, more sprites on screen, and more advanced scrolling and pseudo-3D effects, which allowed developers to create scenes with more detail and animation. Audio technology improved and gave consoles the ability to produce a greater variation and range of sound. A notable innovation of this generation was the inclusion of cartridges with on-board memory and batteries to allow users to save their progress in a game, with Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda introducing the technology to the worldwide market. This innovation allowed for much more expansive gaming worlds and in-depth storytelling, since users could now save their progress rather than having to start each gaming session at the beginning. By the next generation, the capability to save games became ubiquitous—at first saving on the game cartridge itself and, later, when the industry changed to read-only optical disks, on memory cards, hard disk drives, and eventually cloud storage.