Toshiba Corporation today announced that it will launch a new series of SD memory cards offering the world's fastest data write speed. The latest edition to its line-up of EXCERIA memory cards designed to offer users of high-end digital cameras an excellent experience, the EXCERIA PRO and EXCERIA cards will be launched in major markets worldwide, starting with Japan in October. EXCERIA series will write at 240 MB/sec (!)EXCERIA cards compliant with UHS-II will be available in two series. The EXCERIA PRO series will offer photographers a data write speed of 240 MB/sec the world's fastest, while the EXCERIA series will write at 120 MB/sec. They will allow digital camera users to shoot still images continuously at high speed.
The cards are the first in the EXCERIA line-up to integrate a newly developed controller compliant with UHS-II the ultra high speed serial bus interface defined in SD Memory Card Standard Ver. 4.10, and they achieve significantly higher data transfer speeds than earlier UHS-I compliant cards.
While digital cameras have made huge strides in image quality and versatility, users have long wanted to see improvements in data transfer rates and write times, so as to be able to takes bursts of photographs in quick succession. This demand has grown increasingly strong as high performance digital single-lens reflex cameras and mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras have gained popularity and moved into the mainstream. Further advances in higher resolution image recording (including 4K2K video), will also fuel demand for transfers of data-rich images at high speed.
Outside of a fewsmartphones, 4K video capture has largely been limited to pro-level hardware; the SD cards in regular cameras frequently can't handle so many pixels at once. That won't be a problem in the near future, as the SD Association has just unveiled an Ultra High Speed Class 3 (U3) card format that's up to the job. The spec guarantees write performance of at least 30 MB/s, or enough bandwidth to record 4K clips without hiccups. You'll have to wait for U3-capable devices and cards to begin shooting, but it shouldn't be long before you can produce footage worthy of your Ultra HD TV.
