Panasonic to release 64GB SD card. Eventually a two TB card
Panasonic has announced it will soon be releasing its first SDXC card which will be 64GB.
How big is that?
Take the best picture you can on a 35 mm camera, do not use any compression, and then bung 2,133 pictures on the one card.
Note SDXC cards will NOT not be backwards compatible, meaning that they will not be able to be used in SD or SDHC-enabled devices.
More modern digital cameras gather 10 or even 12 bits of the single color pixel, and keep it as it is if they record in RAW mode. With the increased memory we will get improved color.
Will anyone seriously notice? Possibly. It may only make a difference in landscape and other photography but it will make a difference.
Alistair Robins of Panasonic, which is a founding member of the SD Card Association, tried putting a 64GB SD card into some sort of perspective, a dual layer Blu-ray disc is ‘only’ 50 GB.
At the CES event in the USA this year, the SD Card Association announced the next generation SD card called the SDXC or SD Extended Capacity.
You can store up to a theoretical 2 terabytes of data on a SD card the size of a postage stamp (just like the one in the illustration) and with read/write speeds of 300 MB per second. This is possible, practical, likely. But not just yet for a while. Say five years or so.
In Singapore Alistair Robins, Panasonic Australia category marketing manager, Mobile AV, said, “SDXC will now mean that in the future it will be possible to store up to two terabytes of information on an SD card with speeds of 300 megabytes per second.”
If we get as far as terabytes, and we surely will, we have a new realm of possibilities. We will wear out cameras out before we have filled the card.
In computers, Netbooks simply will not have hard disk drives. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any computer having a hard disk drive.
You can buy a 2TB hard disk drive today for about $2,000 and the price is coming down with a run.
What happens if you can replace them which a card which is inherently more reliable and a lot cheaper?
Even today it can be shown that a very good digital camera will produce superior results to most film cameras.
When you have the whole wild world of two megapixels to save each image, then film will be stone cold dead. Except for strange enthusiasts.
And, on computers, hard disks will be a term we remember from the past because on our Netbook or whatever we will have several hundred times the memory we have now — all on cards a little larger than postage cards.
Related Posts:
February 11th, 2009
What is the MSRP?
February 14th, 2009
No one knows, as yet. But the basis of all pricing –MSRP — is start as high as you can get away with and then come down with a run as soon as production ramps up. And cards are very much a rampable situation. At the beginning they will be a daft price but look for them to come down to, say, half disk price. Which will be about $200 a megabyte. That is guessing but is, I think, well in the ball park – evenutally.
February 18th, 2009
“You can buy a 2TB hard disk drive today for about $2,000 and the price is coming down with a run.”
More like $250…You need to check details.
But yeah, with this tech, blu-ray recordable discs are doomed. In fact, optical discs are likely doomed. Why fumble around for slow optical discs when movies can be downloaded (either at home or at kiosks) to cheap, fast HDDs and moved around with fast SDXC cards?
April 5th, 2009
Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)
May 6th, 2009
Well, as soon as I can buy a 64GB SDXC card for $5.00, I’ll worry about the future of Blu-Ray. Well, that, and they need to guarantee flash for more than 10 years (data life, not device life). And it’s downloading that 64GB a couple of times a month that’s going to be the gating factor, not storing it… there isn’t remotely the network capacity for that.
And yeah, $250 for that two TB drive… that means that I’m spending an addtional $6.00 or so for the average single-disc Blu-Ray if I could download. That doesn’t sound horrible.. but if I think about the 6-disc “Lost” box set, now it’s $36.. and I only paid $40.00 for the Blu-Ray set. Given that a trip to Best-Buy is stil faster than that 300GB download, too… er, yeah, you can see the day coming for practical video downloads similar to music today, but it’s ways off for those who are not going to give up on quality (consider, you do on most music downloads, fewer still rival higher spec audio formats like DVD-Audio or SACD).
The most annoying thing here is that there’s no reason SDHC couldn’t support 2TB, other than the SD Card organization set 32GB as the arbitrary limit. Sure, it’ll be nice to see exFAT take away the 4GB limit, but they could have made that an SDHC option without obsoleting all sorts of hardware, and creating yet another round of consumer confusion.
November 3rd, 2009
A bit of an error in the Article, you can get a 2TB drive for under $200, not $2,000.