With great storage capacity comes great flexibility. SanDisk, one of the world’s main manufacturers of flash memory storage, has just broken another record by launching the first 512GB SD card.
The new SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I card was unveiled yesterday in Amsterdam, and is expected to be available soon. The only problem with it would be the hefty price, as not many people are willing to pay $800 for an SD card, regardless of its capacity. The price is explained by the uniqueness of this product, but as SanDisk’s competitors will start developing similarly sized SD cards, the price will drop considerably.
SanDisk described it as follows: “The new offering is designed to meet the demands of industry professionals who require the most advanced gear available for shooting 4K Ultra High Definition (3,840×2,160p) video, Full HD video (1,920×1,080) and high-speed burst mode photography.”
Dinesh Bahal, VP of product marketing at SanDisk, added that “4K Ultra HD is an example of a technology that is pushing us to develop new storage solutions capable of handling massive file sizes.”
Mind you, the 512GB Sandisk SD card is about more than just storage capacity. As seen in the above picture, the card has transfer speeds of up to 95MB/s. This should come handy when transferring large 4K videos, or when the card reaches its limit and its content needs to be copied elsewhere.
Grant Petty, CEO of video post-production house Blackmagic Design, noted that “The new 512GB SanDisk Extreme PRO UHS-I card offers incredible speed and capacity. Our Pocket Cinema Camera customers shoot in every type of circumstance and location, and get amazing wide dynamic range RAW images capturing the brightest highlights and darkest shadows at the same time. The additional capacity of the SanDisk Extreme PRO UHS-I card will extend the creative freedom for our customers shooting in RAW and open up the ability to use wide dynamic range RAW files with even more productions.”
John Delaney, a senior mobile analyst from IDC, remarked that developing SD cards with great capacities is important, even though more and more people turn their attention to cloud solutions, which are often cheaper and safer: “The thing that is driving cloud storage is multiple devices usage – which solves the, ‘Where’s my stuff?’ problem: if you use cloud storage for everything, whatever device you have with you can be used to access your content. So far there’s still a strong preference for local storage. People just feel more in control and more able to rely on being able to access the content when they literally know where it is. Storing in the cloud means you literally don’t know where it is.”
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