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Breaking the Size Barrier by Jon Sienkiewicz New SanDisk Memory Cards Provide Expanded Capacity for Professionals and Hobbyists Alike Article rating: 6.27

If you capture in RAW plus JPEG format with a 10 or 12 megapixel camera, you may be dealing with image files that are 20MB or even larger. As a matter of fact, an uncompressed TIFF file captured with a 5-megpixel digital camera is around 15 megabytes. The results may be extraordinary, but that kind of shooting fills a memory card fast—until now. SanDisk, the folks who invented flash storage cards, have broken the size barrier with the introduction of new products at Photokina.

Compact Flash
SanDisk, the world’s largest supplier of flash data storage card products, introduced the highest capacity cards in the world: 12GB and 16GB SanDisk Extreme III Compact Flash cards. Both cards have minimum sustained write and read speeds of 20 megabytes per second—which means they are also among the world’s fastest cards. Expect to find them at your favorite retailer by the end of the year.

In a recent press release, Tanya Chuang—SanDisk’s senior retail product marketing manager—said, “The SanDisk Extreme III line combines exceptional performance and reliability with large capacities to provide an ideal storage solution for professional photographers that meets their shooting and workflow requirements. We believe that SanDisk will continue to be the preferred choice by professional photographers based on our capacity and performance advantages as well as our commitment to the digital photography market as a whole.”

Unlike some memory card brands that are fabricated using off-the-shelf parts made by various different manufacturers, SanDisk cards are the result the company’s continual technological innovation. For example, the Extreme III line of cards uses SanDisk’s proprietary ESP (Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing) technology.  This SanDisk-developed technology combines advanced NAND flash memory chips and controller designs, 32-bit RISC processing and leading edge algorithms for an architecture that streamlines every aspect of read and write data transfer operations to attain faster throughput overall.

The new 16GB SanDisk Extreme III Compact Flash card is expected to retail for $1,049.99 while the 12GB version lists at $779.99. On a gigabyte-per-dollar basis, the 16GB card is very reasonable, priced at the equivalent of about $65 per GB. But in a more real sense, if you need the tremendous capacity, high performance and superlative reliability that these SanDisk cards provide, there’s no way to put a price tag on it.

SD High Capacity
If your camera or camcorder uses SDHC instead of Compact Flash, there’s good news for you, too. Simultaneous with the announcement of the 12GB and 16GB CF cards, SanDisk announced a 4GB SanDisk Ultra II SD High Capacity (SDHC). The SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card features minimum sustained write speeds of 9 megabytes per second and read speeds of 10MB/sec.

Aside from special markings, SDHC cards look exactly like standard SD but function only with cameras and other devices that are specifically designated as SDHC compatible. Why SDHC and not plain old SD? The SDHC specification was developed by the SD Association to support capacities from 4GB to 32GB. Standard SD cannot be stretched to meet this expanded capacity.

The retail price of this beefy new card is expected to be $219, but as an added bonus, SanDisk is bundling a SanDisk MicroMate USB 2.0 reader (a $20 value) at no additional charge. SDHC cards require an SDHC-compatible reader to transfer images from card to computer, and the MicroMate readers work with both SDHC and SD cards.

Anna Enerio, retail product marketing manager at SanDisk said, “The 4GB SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card and MicroMate reader bundle offers high capacity, proven performance and versatility at an exceptional value. We are confident that consumers will find this to be an ideal combination for storage-intensive applications such as digital cameras and video recording.”

Rescue PRO Software
SanDisk bundles Rescue PRO 2.0 image recovery software with their Extreme line of memory cards, including the 16GB and 12GB Compact Flash cards mentioned above. Rescue PRO software allows photographers to recover accidentally deleted images, lost digital images or data under most circumstances. The software is menu driven and easy to use. It provides two scanning options: Quick Scan if the media is not corrupt or formatted and Full Scan if it is. It’s reasonably fast even in the Full Mode—it scanned a 512Mb card in under seven minutes—and displays the recovered images in a list or as thumbnails.

Rescue PRO will also allow you to irretrievably erase image files from your memory cards, something to keep in mind if you sometimes loan a camera or card to others. Most images that are deleted can be recovered, so unless you want to share your images with others, use Rescue PRO or another file scrubbing software before loaning out equipment.

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good Posted by: vatchara maneerat Aug 18, 2007 @ 9:44 PM EST

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