The SD Association has unveiled a new generation of SD cards, dubbed SDXC. These "eXtended Capacity" cards are likely to provide 64 GB of storage at first and will eventually max out at a whopping 2 TB.
Read/write speeds will start at 104 MB per second, but the SD Association plans to push that speed to 300 MB per second over time.
Mobile phones are seen as the main benefactor in this development. One could imagine fancier video games and higher quality music and video if this new generation becomes the standard.
"SDXC allows users to enjoy more from their mobile phones. Larger capacity and faster transfer speeds allow for expanded entertainment and data storage," James Taylor, President of the SD Association, said in a press release. "At its maximum 2TB capacity, an SDXC memory card will store an estimated 100 HD movies, 480 hours of HD recording or 136,000 fine-mode photos."
Obviously, camcorders and cameras will benefit as well. Shigeto Kanda, a general manager at Canon, suggests in the press release that SDXC can store more than 4,000 RAW images.
There's no mention of replacing optical media in this press release, but it's a point that will become hard to ignore if these cards become cheaper. At least for storage purposes, SD could beat out discs in the long run.
As for replacing entertainment media, with all the standalone Blu-Ray players, DVD drives and car CD players, that's going to be slow to budge. In any case, it's not something that the SD Association is touting right now.
