News - Sony announces first high-speed XQD memory cards

[HEXUS]

Arriving just in time for the Nikon D4, Sony launches the XQD format.

Read more.

[Infinite]

Sony and new memory card format.... Jesus

[keithwalton]

It might be fast, but how much! a 16GB class 10 sd card is £15 ($23) and 32GB class 10 for £28 ($43)
I also laugh at the 'up to 100 raw images a second' yeah probably at vga res!
In camera's burst mode is far more useful than continuous shooting as well you may as well be shooting video instead.
Burst mode is more dependant on how much ram (/buffer) the camera has and how it writes this out to storage.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Another flipping memory card format and even the Nikon D4 has one of the slots too!

Why can't it be standardised to just SD and CF??

[shaithis]

Why can't it be standardised to just SD and CF??

TBH, I'd like to see it standardised to some kind of "internal USB slot"

[blueball]

and how much will the new D4 cost?

http://hexus.net/ce/press-releases/c...-specs-inside/

[danroyle]

Why can't it be standardised to just SD and CF??

because that would be too easy now wouldn't it.

[blueball]

Seen prices for D4 at $6000/£4800

I'll stick to my D80 for now

[OilSheikh]

Doesn't Sony have another new media card format that they use for PSP VITA? lol

[gagaga]

These are aimed at pros - hence the performance and price tags. These cards are not a Sony format - they are from the CF consortium. They need to replace the CF interface (which is still effectively PCI/IDE), so might as well change the physical format of the card too (and sata / PCIe need far fewer pins than IDE so the card can be smaller).

Fast, quality SD cards used by (semi)pros cost 3-4 times the price you'll be used to paying (look at the cost of Sandisk 45MB/s cards for a start).. and they cost a fraction of decent CF cards.

Having a 1gig RAM buffer is no use if it's going to take an hour to write out to the card - you need this speed if you've got a run of 30 25MB raw files to dump out before the football goes whizzing by again.

[Whiternoise]

Come on people, you were expecting it to be cheap? Less than 10 years ago I paid over £60 for a 512mb USB stick which was considered ludicrously big. Only a few years ago a 16GB stick was well over £100. Current tech is cheap because economy of scale has won out.

As for how fast? The article says 125MB/s. Current comparable technology is the 90MBs CF card:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sandisk-Extr...5928368&sr=8-4

This isn't designed for consumer cameras, this is aimed at HD video and medium format SLRs. The write speed of SD makes things like 4K home video impractical. And up to 600MB/s? That's insanely fast, but the RED Epic needs up to 225MB/s for 120fps 5K footage so you can see how this is useful.

Nikon seem to be on board already and it's camera makers that will ultimately decide the fate of this, I think. Sony will presumably also roll this out to their cameras - remember they're very big players in prosumer video (they work with a lot of big TV companies, including the BBC) as well as their compacts, SLRs and maybe even other products.

Note that it was developed by Nikon, Sony and Sandisk so hopefully we're not going to get a Canon-Nikon format war...