Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

As announced previously, the SDHC UHS-I standard allows for faster speeds on SD cards, and now Sandisk and Kingston have announced their respective versions. I am still wondering what UHS-I devices are there though! Hit the links for information on pricing.

Kingston UltimateXX SDHC UHS-I

Sandisk Extreme Pro SDHC UHS-I

"Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media, today announced new Lexar® Professional Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) memory cards. The new high-capacity Lexar Professional 133x SDXC cards enable the capture, storage, and transfer of extended lengths of 1080p high-definition (HD) video and continuous, rapid-fire image capture in a single, high-performance solution. The Lexar Professional 133x SDXC card is the first available in a 128GB capacity, and is also offered in a 64GB capacity. Both cards are speed rated at 133x, providing a minimum guaranteed transfer speed of 20MB per second, and feature a Class 10 speed designation."

128 GB on an SD card? We all knew it was only a matter of time, but wow, it's still impressive to see. 128 GB memory cards are kind of like 3 TB hard drives...the market for the number of people that truly need that much storage is small, but if you need it, you'll be thrilled to have this much storage in a small package. Oh, it's $699 USD. That might turn off a few people...

"Panasonic has announced its newest 8GB and 16GB SDHC UHS-I memory cards. UHS-I is the new standard for higher-speed Bus interface defined by the SD Association as part of the SD Memory Card Specification Ver.3.01, which provides up to 104MB/s performance."

Alright, so there's no pricing information yet, but like with all Panasonic SD cards based on the latest standards, they will be expensive, with promised speeds of 60MB/s. The announcement of the new speed standard has slipped under my radar, but now we have SDHC and SDXC standards to track, and the speed standards of Class 2-10 and UHS-I 1 to keep tabs on as well. Can the SD Association get their act together and get everything together in one standard for the future? Thanks!

The evolution of storage usually goes something like this: the medium gets a lot of attention when it's young, then as it grows older, it typically becomes a commodity that we care less about. Think of the early years of hard drives: moving from 40 MB to 80 MB was a massive improvement, and it was a big day when the first 1 GB drives hit the market. But now? We hardly bother to yawn when a 3 TB drive is announced. Sure, there are some stand-out drives (Western Digital's Raptor line for instance), but for the most part, hard drives are the forgotten technology inside your computer. SSDs, however, are still a young technology: performance improvements, capacity enhancements, and cost drops are still exciting enough to get a geek's heart going.

Flash memory falls somewhere in between those two; from a digital photography perspective, Flash memory storage has become so cavernous that the average person never needs to think twice about running out of space, unless they're shooting 1080p video alongside their still photos. There's still a bit of excitement left in the performance realm though, and SanDisk is at the forefront of pushing faster Flash memory. Their line of Extreme SDHC cards for instance are Class 10 performance, and claim up to 30 MB/s (200x) read and write speeds. They also cost a fair bit more than other brands. I set out to answer a fairly straight-forward question: was it worth it, from a practical standpoint, so shell out the extra money for a SanDisk Extreme SDHC card? Read more...

If you've got a DSLR that's in the prosumer or professional range, odds are that it uses CompactFlash memory cards. While we're starting to see prosumer/professional DSLRs supporting Secure Digital (SD) cards - the D300s has both CF and SD card slots - by and large most of these cameras only support CompactFlash. This leaves laptop users in a quandary: how do you get your images off that CompactFlash card? Sure you, could bring the cable for your camera and move it off that way - but that requires you bring the cable with you, and your camera batteries are draining while that transfer happens. Not ideal. You could bring a USB-based memory card reader with you, but it's one more thing to forget to bring with you. If your laptop has an ExpressCard54 slot, you could use a Delkin ExpressCard CompactFlash Adaptor like I do, but an increasing number of laptops are dropping ExpressCard slots entirely, or going for the narrower ExpressCard34 slots. Delkin has an adaptor for the ExpressCard34 slot, but it sticks out so you can't leave it in all the time. So what do you do? You switch to shooting onto an SD card using the Delkin SD to CF Adaptor that's what. I bought one from Amazon.com [affiliate] for $24.95 USD and wanted to share my experiences using it. Read more...