To cater to the ever increasing resolutions found in higher-end digital cameras, Lexar Media announced last week that it has begun shipping the industry’s first speed-rated 1GB capacity CompactFlash Type II card.
The 16X-speed 1GB Professional Series card clocks a sustained write speed of 2.4MB per second and has a suggested list price $1,199.
Lexar rolled out its write speed campaign as a way to differentiate itself in the competitive flash memory market, which saw dramatic retail price erosion during 2001. The rating indicates the speed at which image data is saved from camera to memory card.
Higher-end consumer/advanced amateur cameras can often capture images in RAW or TIFF modes. Shooting in RAW or TIFF creates uncompressed images that can result in file sizes of up to 15MB or more. These large files quickly devour the capacity of smaller memory cards, considering a large number of digital cameras ship with 16MB cards to spur add-on sales.
