With CES currently in full swing, the future of two of our tech world memory card formats has been announced. First and foremost, SDXC has been launched, the successor to SDHC. The 'XC' stands for 'eXtended Capacity' and allows cards of up to 2 Terabytes (that's roughly 2000 GB) and up to 104MB/s for read/write speeds. Presumably 'micro' versions of SDXC will also appear at some point, for phone use. Secondly, the M2 cards used by some Sony Ericsson UIQ 3 smartphones are set to be superceded by 'Memory Stick HG Micro', also promising up to 2TB and with 60MB/s transfer speeds.
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A little cross making that a perfectly good format is going to be obsoleted when SDHC can handle 2TB theoretically (most likely with a low chance of being compatible with SDHC devices). However with write rates like that, even less excuse for manufacturers to integrate HD video capture into future devices.
twinpeaked
I gather you meant "to not integrate"? Anyway, I don't think they are using "excuses" to avoid integrating HD. If they can make a business case, you bet they will integrate it as soon as they possibly can and preferably ahead of the competition.
A transfer speed of 100 megabytes per second would make music and video transfers incredibly fast, an entire gigabyte of data could be copied in 10 seconds. The SD association's "roadmap" talks about SDXC going up to 300 MB per second, which would mean the entire 2 terabyte card would take about two hours to copy.
And a 2 terabyte storage capacity would let you store about 0.5 - 1 million music tracks.
1 million tracks per card, two hours copying time.
Those two together will make it much more plausible to start copying entire music archives rather casually. Piracy won't be about copying the tracks you want, but about copying everything and then seeing if there are any tracks you want in there.
Most online music stores have something like 5 to 15 million different tracks available. How many years from now will we see cards become available that can store 15 million tracks? Or 30? or 100? It seems like our capacity to store and transfer content is going to far outstrip our ability to create it.
"It seems like our capacity to store and transfer content is going to far outstrip our ability to create it."
This assuming all we want to do is to store is music, and in a lossy compression format (mp3). Consider this:
1) some of us already watch movies/tv on their phones
2) the resolution of cell phone displays is rapidly approaching DVD full D1 (720x480); the 5800 XM and N97 are already at 640x360.
3) a DVD rip (no lossy xvid/mp4 compression) is 4 to 8 GB in size
4) a single season of a tv show is several DVDs, usually 5 or 6
and you see that 2TB is going to be just barely adequate to store one's collection of music, movies, and favorite tv shows.
This assuming all we want to do is to store is music, and in a lossy compression format (mp3).
I take your point, but I'd say that's a fairly safe assumption. Look at how rapidly MP3 downloads are replacing uncompressed audio CDs, most people are clearly willing to sacrifice audio quality for the sake of convenience and storage capacity.
And in 5 or 10 years time SD cards will be even bigger and probably able to store millions of uncompressed audio files which really are CD quality.
We're very close to having unlimited storage of music, because there won't be enough music to fill a single storage card.
1) some of us already watch movies/tv on their phones
You're right about video, video is a totally different game and I agree that will take a lot longer to fill storage devices.
Video files vary a lot more than audio files in size, because video files are designed for particular screen sizes: the video file on a Blu-ray disc will be much larger than a video file intended for mobile phones. And some people will want to watch mobile phone videos on their televisions through TV Out, so even phone video files may have to get bigger.
...and even if we could store millions of blu-ray files on a memory card, people may eventually want even higher resolution videos to project on their walls.