August 20, 2010, Newsletter Issue #150: SD Cards Growing Again

Tip of the Week

SD (Secure Digital) flash memory cards are the storage media of choice for most consumer digital camera manufacturers. They're small and inexpensive. And standard SD cards can hold up to 4 GB of data.


But the megapixel race has put a strain on standard SD cards. 4 GB isn't all that much when your camera packs a 12-megapixel sensor.


That's where SDHC (SD High Capacity) cards came in. Holding up to 32 GB of data, SDHC cards would seem to be enough for anyone. Except that true HD video has come to consumer digital cameras. And if you shoot HD video, you know those files eat a lot of space - fast.


Now there's the new SDXC (SD eXtended Capacity) cards - which will be able to hold up to 2 TB (Yes, that's terabytes!) of data. The new SDXC cards will also feature much faster data transfer speeds - up to 300 MB/second.


Pretec unveiled a 32 GB SDXC card in March, but held back on its release, because there were no compatible devices available. While the capacity of this card is no greater than the largest SDHC cards, it's read/write speed is much faster.


Toshiba was the first manufacturer on board with a bigger capacity (64 GB) SDXC card. Toshiba announced the new card in August... but it won't be available until December. And then only samples are planned.


Right now, SDXC remains on the horizon. But as SDXC-compatible digital cameras and digital video cameras hit the market, expect to see this updated format take off.

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