Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association’s unveiling of a new Wi-Fi data transfer standard. This new specification should make it easier for other memory card manufacturers to jump into the Wi-Fi-capable memory card game — an arena currently dominated by Eye-Fi (and more recently Toshiba).

Eye-Fi is, predictably, not happy with this latest development. The company is itself part of the SD Association, but has chosen not to back the standard. In a blog post published last week, CEO Yuval Koren argues that any company implementing the new standard would violate Eye-Fi’s patents for technology that took “tens of millions of dollars and several years” to create.

(via Eye-Fi via Engadget)

Image credit: Eye-Fi card by sphynge

If having a plastic shelled memory card just isn’t enough for you, Hoodman’s new RAW STEEL line of SD cards goes a step further by reinforcing the card with steel plating. In addition to being rugged, the epoxy assembly makes the cards waterproof as well. No word on how well these cards would survive being roasted in a burning car, though. They’ll be available starting mid-November, 2010.

Toshiba is gearing up to take on Eye-Fi, the memory card that allows you to throw out your card reader and transfer photos wirelessly. They’ve teamed up with Trek 2000, a Singapore-based flash corp., to form the “Standard Promotion Forum for Memory Cards Embedding Wireless LAN” in an effort to standardize the technology behind wireless SD cards. Toshiba is pushing a new 8GB SD card that transfers JPEG and RAW files over IEEE 802.11 b/g, entering a market previously dominated by Eye-Fi.

This is great news for consumers, since increased competition in this space will likely help drive prices down. An 8GB Eye-Fi SD card currently costs about $100.

(via Engadget)

Over the weekend, Best Buy sent out weekly advertising that included a Canon 7D bundle. Funny thing is, they don’t seem to understand that the 7D only takes CompactFlash memory cards, and are selling the bundle with a SanDisk 8GB SD card. Also, it’s not just the advertisement — the online product info also shows the SD card in the images and in the text.

Perhaps next time they should put a photographer in charge of creating their special offer packages.

Do you think they’re actually giving people SD cards with this camera, or is it simply a huge typo/”photoshopo”?

Update: @Coral_BestBuy just responded via Twitter:

@petapixel thanks for the heads up – we’re looking into this right now

Looks like it was a “photoshopo”.

Update: They’ve fixed the website a couple hours after we posted this. That was pretty fast.

SanDisk just released its 64GB Ultra SDXC (extended capacity) memory card, the largest capacity for the Secure Digital format. It has a read speed of up to 15MB/second, stores up to eight hours of high-definition video, and costs $350. The new card uses the SD 3.0 specification, which allows capacities up to 2TB (2000GB).

It just so happens that today the CompactFlash Association also announced the CF5.0 specification, which allows memory cards up to 144PB (petabytes), or 150,994,944GB. Oh boy.

Sadly, the new Compact Flash specification only affords transfer speeds up to 32MB/s, meaning a full 144PB card would take about 153 years to transfer.