SanDisk Announces 256MB SD Card

Many camcorders, including ones made by Canon, Panasonic and JVC use SD cards to store digital stills that the camcorder takes or to store MPEG video. This is the largest SD card available yet, and beats out Sony's competing Memory Stick format, for which the largest size is only 128MB. The card will retail for $199, which is a low price point per megabyte.

The card will be available in this quarter. Currently, the flash memory storage market is very competitive, with Sony's Memory Stick competing against SD backed by JVC, Panasonic and Canon (which is a much less propreitary format than Memory Stick) and Smart Media which is backed by Panasonic and Sharp (also much less proprietary). It is very likely that Sony will either announce a new 256MB or higher Memory Stick or reduce the price of the existing Memory Stick models in the comming month in order to compete with this new announcement by SanDisk.