Panasonic's Class 10 SDHC cards make the wait for SDXC easier

A full 15 months after Panasonic dropped jaws with its 32GB Class 6 SDHC card, the company is hitting us up with another world's first. Announced today over in Europe, the outfit has revealed a new line of SDHC memory cards that boast a Class 10 speed rating. Said spec was recently given the green light as part of the SD Card Specification v3.0, and as you could likely surmise, the increase in transfer rates should enable the cards to better handle all that HD video your DSLR seems to be capturing these days. Still, the boost is relatively minimal (particularly compared to the forthcoming SDXC format), with Class 10 promising maximum speeds of 22MB/sec and Class 6 cards already offering top-end rates of 20MB/sec. Mum's the word on price, but Panny expects these to ship next month in the UK before heading to other markets sometime later.

[NickNick @ May 21st 2009 7:17AM]

gimme gimme gimmee

[john @ May 21st 2009 2:17PM]

If only pc encoding power could catch up with all these gigabytes...I'm not so eager shooting in HD.

[Adderz @ May 21st 2009 7:21AM]

Death to Memory Stick and XD

[superhobo @ May 21st 2009 7:26AM]

XD is clearly much more happier and fun than XC

What are you, goth or emo or something?

[Ian @ May 21st 2009 8:12AM]

Actually, the new Sony Alpha DSLRs use SDHC (according to a post on Engadget that is), so you may get your death to memory stick wish.

[Jaws @ May 21st 2009 12:37PM]

excuse me Ian... have you ever looked at a Sony alpha dSLR? I'm guessing not. They used CompactFlash cards (memory stick only with a CF --> MS adapter).

[chrisk1590 @ May 21st 2009 1:09PM]

Their new Alpha DSLRs support SDHC and Memory Stick. Obviously they're not going to put SD on their older models.

[The_WB @ May 21st 2009 7:32AM]

About time!

[raisinberry777 @ May 21st 2009 7:37AM]

I think they need to worry about storage capacity (and a cheap price) more than speed. Imagine when your whole DVD collection is the size of your thumb!

[stonedhippy @ May 21st 2009 7:44AM]

Does anyone happen to know the max write speed of your average DSLR (or specifically a Nikon D60)?

I'm wondering where the bottle neck is in the process of writing your photos to the memory card, surely 22MB/s or even 20MB/s is faster than your camera can output?

[Styn @ May 21st 2009 8:12AM]

Outputspeed of a DSL is easy to compute.
Let's say my 30D captures images of about 7MB/image and it's (theoretically) able to capture 5fps -> 35MB/s output. And this is an old DSLR!
The bottleneck is both the internal memory and the writespeed of the card.
I have no idea about the writespeeds of the device itself but i doubt that's really a bottleneck.

[Metaknife @ May 21st 2009 8:28AM]

I'm assuming you're using the burst mode, and if that's the case the measurement is flawed. DSLRs use volatile memory buffers capable of storing a number of images. They are then slowly written back to the main memory card. This allows fast picture taking while mitigating the slow write times.

You maybe correct in saying that cache can also read at the same rate it is loaded, but this does not necessarily imply that the bus is in place to transfer data from the cache to the memory card.

[Ian @ May 21st 2009 8:13AM]

I'd imagine theres a USB 2.0 controller in there, as when you hook it to the PC using USB you can get some pretty fast reads off of it. I see no reason that there would be a limit other than 480mbit/sec of USB 2.0. This is all educated guessing though, I don't know for sure.

[Wwhat @ May 21st 2009 9:36AM]

I'd classify that as semi-educated guessing

[strider_mt2k @ May 21st 2009 8:24AM]

Awesomeness!
That speed boost will be extremely helpful as the capacities increase.

But at the same time WOW are we living the future with this stuff or what?

SUPER GOOD!

[bebop @ May 21st 2009 8:25AM]

Write speeds people! Class 4 = >4 MB/s, Class 6 = >6MB/s... Class 10 = >10 MB/s? If so that would be a big improvement to the specification, though in practice Panny's class 6 cards already write speeds in that region iirc...

[Wwhat @ May 21st 2009 9:38AM]

Indeed, one should separate the read from the write speed, all nice to say you can read 22MB/s but meaningless when you need to first write it, live, while you are waiting.

[Precurse @ May 21st 2009 9:54AM]

It's MINIMUM write speed. Class 6 was the highest one could be rated. It didn't matter if it could write at 6MB or at 100MB/s - it would still be listed as "Class 6". Good to see this.

[CLShortFuse @ May 21st 2009 10:43AM]

The SanDisk Extreme III (which I have) copies 30MBps and is labeled Class 6. Maybe SanDisk should be Class 15 then.

[endym10ntheboy @ May 21st 2009 11:29AM]

Drooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool...

8-|°°°°°°°°°°°

[Stellist @ May 21st 2009 11:49AM]

Is it world's first right?

In Korea, 'Zeda Class 10 SDHC Card' being sold since January 09.

[s0dOlS @ May 21st 2009 12:52PM]

try finding a reader/writer that supports such speeds

[locuus @ May 21st 2009 1:23PM]

What kind of speeds do 1080p camcorders use then? The ones that write directly to SDHC cards. 20MB/sec?

What kind of speed does a 1080p 30 fps camcorder need to be able to record with no hiccups?

[Bob R. @ May 21st 2009 4:03PM]

Currently the JVC GY-HM700 is the highest-end professional video camera which records directly to SDHC cards. The data rate is 35mb/s (mega-bits, not bytes). JVC requires Class 6 SDHC cards. The compression scheme is basically Sony's XD-CAM EX codec, an MPEG2 variant.

So until someone introduces a camera which records a higher-bandwidth codec, Class 6 cards are sufficient for recording. However, if you're regularly using that work flow to produce "breaking news" field pieces and need to get video off of the card ASAP, every second counts, Class 10 cards paired with a fast reader may be slightly helpful, but the real-world performance would have to be tested.

[DR House @ May 21st 2009 4:34PM]

Class 4 cards is MORE than enough for HD camcorders they record maximum in 24Mbps thats 3MB/S
Class 4 cards slowest speed is 4MB/s

[Joe Ogiba @ May 23rd 2009 10:05AM]

I use a 16GB Sandisk Extreme III 30mb/sec SDHC card for HD video now so why what is the big deal with a slower 22mb/sec SDHC card ?