Well, it's a good week since we said that Pretec had raised the bar on SD memory with thier 8GB card. The compact flash boys were looking a little green because that matched their best in a much smaller card. So it wasn't really a surprise that Samsung have just announced a 64GB compact flash card. That's twice the theoretical capacity of SDHC and should keep you going for a bit.
It's calculator time again....if you have a Nikon D2X you can shoot 10MB compressed raw files. A 64GB card is the equivalent of 178 rolls of 36 exposure film - or 4 times what the average film user was reckoned to shoot in their lifetime... The words "eggs", "one" and "basket" come to mind.
The press release has got people excited about the prospect of laptop running entirely on compact flash memory and that now seems a possibility - just as long as the new operating systems don't grow faster than the memory chips.
In the interests of accuracy I'd better point out that Samsung haven't really announced a 64GB card today. They have announced a new type of 32Gb (little b for "bit") NAND memory that would allow them to build a 64GB (big B for "Byte" = 8 X bit) card if they wanted too. In a way this is more like the announcement of SDHC with its 32 GB limit rather than any real cards you could actually go and buy. Didn't stop them mocking one up for their website though.
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