While AI and camera-to-cloud technologies continue to dominate the future of filmmaking and video production conversations, one area in which technology is also picking up incredible speed is storage and microSD card capabilities.
Samsung Electronics has just announced that they have started sampling a new breed of microSD cards with a new 256GB SD Express microSD card, along with a large-capacity 1TB UHS-I microSD card.
Samsung is looking to race these new microSDs to the market to be an industry-first for this technology, as well as aiming to redshift the camera card industry itself to possibly adapt these small, but still quite powerful, microSD options.
Samsung’s 256GB SD Express microSD Card
Now, there’s a lot to unpack regarding these new microSD cards announced by Samsung. Firstly, according to Samsung, this new project came together in part thanks to a “successful collaboration with a customer” which sounds a bit odd, to say the least. However, the tech giant is quite excited about this new technology and its possibilities.
“With our two new microSD cards, Samsung has provided effective solutions to address the growing demands of mobile computing and on-device AI. Despite their tiny size, these memory cards deliver powerful SSD-like performance and capacity to help users get more out of demanding modern and future applications.” — Hangu Sohn, Vice President of the Memory Brand Product Biz Team at Samsung Electronics.
This new 256GB SD Express microSD card in particular promises to offer performance equal to SSDs, but in a smaller form factor and with read speeds up to 985MB/s, which would be 1.4x faster than SATA SSDs.
The Future of microSD Cards
Samsung has also announced that they have started production of their high-capacity 1TB UHS-I microSD cards as well. Relying on 8 stacked layers of their 8th-gen 1-terabit VNAND technology these new cards should be quite durable and safe to use in a variety of adverse environments and shoots.
The real question here might simply be who is this new microSD card technology going to benefit the most? There are no current cameras that could make use of a 256GB SD Express microSD card right now, and with C2C and other direct-to-cloud technologies on the rise, it isn’t like card storage is on the rise perhaps.
Yet, with such a small form factor and insane level of performance, maybe technology will indeed move towards the micro, even if it is just for backups. However, we’ll see as these cards are rolled out and introduced into the film and video tech landscape.
Price and Availability
Samsung has not yet announced any official price information about these new microSD cards. As far as timelines go their press release also only shares that the 256GB SD Express microSD card will be available later this year, whereas the 1TB UHS-I microSD is set to launch sometime in the fall of 2024.
