SanDisk intros 30MB/sec SDHC cards

SanDisk on Wednesday helped push a transition to SDHC cards for pro and high-end amateur photographers by launching an update to its Extreme III SDHC lineup. The new 30MB/s Edition is about 50 percent faster in both reads and writes than previous Extreme III cards and is deliberately launching alongside cameras such as the Nikon D90, which virtually demand the extra transfer speed for burst shooting. With one of the newer cards, a D90 can shoot at its peak 4.5 frames per second for up to 39 JPEG photos before the SDHC card can no longer keep up.

The extra transfer speed is also useful for offloading a large number of shots from a camera to a computer, SanDisk says. The transfer speed should also assist with recording HD video, which is possible through cameras like the D90 as well as through more recent HD camcorders that use SDHC as their preferred format.

The 30MB/s Edition is a capacity boost for SanDisk's Extreme SDHC series and bumps the maximum storage up to 16GB, which sells for $180. Versions with 4GB and 8GB of storage will sell for $65 and $110 respectively. All three should be in shops sometime in September.