Hannover, Germany — Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) said that it would ship a 1GB SD flash memory card to the U.S. market in May.
The 1GB card will be the highest capacity yet in Panasonic’s SD portfolio. Earlier in the year, flash memory manufacturer SanDisk announced it too would add a 1GB SD card to its lineup. Panasonic said its 1GB will have a suggested retail price of $499.99.
The company said the card would cater to the increasingly popular hybrid digital still/video cameras that save MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 video directly to flash memory cards. In many of these MPEG-4 hybrid devices, a 1GB SD card could hold a full hour of VGA-resolution video and thousands of digital still images.
The announcement was made at the CeBIT show, held here last week.
