By Ian Burley
28th September - 2001
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Yesterday it was Kingston Technology (click here) and today it’s Dane-Elec’s turn to announce a 512MB Compact Flash card. The Dane-Elec product is based on CF technology from partner, Lexar. No price was mentioned in the release (apparently there is too much price volatility to quote one at present), but the news demonstrates that there is increasing momentum in the industry to deliver larger capacity flash memory devices.
www.dane
256MB/512MB SD cards for turn of the year
Meanwhile, Panasonic has announced that it will ship larger capacity SD memory cards starting with 256MB parts from 21st December, followed by 512MB a month later.
Faster too
Big is good, but faster too is even better. The new cards use the latest NAND flash technology to deliver transfer rates of 10MB/sec, five times faster than older NOR-based flash memory cards to date.
Panasonic will publicly show the new cards for the first time at the annual CEATEC elctronic products fair at Makuhari, Tokyo, next month. Also to be shown is a prototype SD DVD player. At typical rates, a 512MB card could contain at least about 8-10 minutes of high quality DVD video or around an hour of MPEG-1 video.
Panasonic/Lumix (Leica), Kodak, Kyocera and Minolta, among others, have adopted SD memory cards in preference to Compact Flash and SmartMedia in selected digital camera models.
The new capacity and speed SD cards will give the platform an important advantage over Sony’s old-technnology memory stick, which currently has a maximum capacity of 128MB. However, Sony is expected to announced 2nd generation NAND-based memory sticks some time next year as a result of its recent strategic partnership with SanDisk (click here).
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DPN News service
www.dp-now.com
