Sony plans to offer its in-house developed standard for NAND flash memory cards for high-speed video recording, with such cards to be launched in 2012, according to industry sources. Sony has invited SanDisk to participate in standard specification, the sources indicated.
With read/write speed bottlenecks found in existing SD cards leading to system crashes, Sony intends to build the standard dubbed XQD for high-end digital still cameras that are capable of shooting high-definition videos, the sources said. The move is also to differentiate its high-speed DSCs from competitors' and enhance hardware features.
The new XQD cards will use PCI Express as the interface, and will be available from 16GB and 32GB onward, the sources revealed.
Sony's previous push of its in-house developed Memory Stick as the mainstream compact memory card standard was not successful, due to rising competition from other standards such as CompactFlash, multimedia card (MMC) and SecuredDigital (SD). Ultimately, SD cards have gone mainstream thanks to the open standard.
Sony should avoid the same error, the sources pointed out. Either setting a closed specification or charging high royalty rates for XQD would limit products to certain manufacturers and its penetration, the sources said.