Cool observation, courtesy of John Nack's Adobe blog: A new SDXC card from Panasonic is eight times more expensive than its weight in gold.
SDXC is a new memory card standard, introduced by the SD Association last year and finally arriving in actual products this year. They'll be faster than the current leading standard, SDHC, with theoretical speeds of 300 MB per second, and will have greater storage capacity, topping out at 2 TB.
Last we checked, Toshiba was supposed to be first to market with SDXC in the spring, but it appears that Panasonic could get there first. The company announced 48 GB and 64 GB cards for February availability, priced at $450 and $600, respectively. As Nack and Photoshop engineer John Peterson determined, given that gold costs roughly $36 per gram, and an SD card weighs roughly 2 grams, you could buy eight times the larger Panasonic SDXC card's weight in gold for the same amount of money.
Of course, we're talking apples and oranges. You can't do much with a hunk of gold except invest in it. However, at this point you can't do much with SDXC cards, either, because they only work in SDXC card slots. Devices supporting these cards are finally starting to appear in digital cameras and camcorders, but it's been slow going.
SDXC might be valuable now for high-end photographers and videographers, but gold has been doing pretty well lately, and the price of memory will only go down. Maybe the rest of us should invest in gold until an SDXC-enabled smartphone comes along.
