XQD: The Latest in Memory Card Technology

Since the advent of digital photography professional photographers have been consistently pushing the limits of the memory cards available in the marketplace. The need for a card that writes at a high speed and has a large storage capacity is just as great as the need for smaller quality DSLR cameras.

The Compact Flash Association (CFA) has just announced a new memory card format, entitled the XQD, which boasts impressive performance numbers; it writes images at a minimum of 125MB per second and will launch with a PCI Express featuring 2.5GB per second. The XQD card has also been physically designed to stand up to the rigors of a professional’s shooting schedule and will fit into slots which can accommodate its dimensions of 38.5 x 29.8 x 3.8mm. For comparison, CompactFlash (CF) has dimensions of 43 x 36 x 5 mm, and Secure Digital (SD) – 32 x 24 x 2.1 mm.

The CFA will begin licensing for the card early in 2012 and will show it off at in Japan at the CFA booth during February’s CP+2012.