Toshiba Ships 4K-Ready CompactFlash Card With 160MB/s Transfer Rate

So, now that 4K HDTVs are hitting the production line, one has to wonder: where is all of that 4K content going to come from? No doubt, some of it will be upscaled 1080p content at first, but many motion pictures are already being shot natively in 4K. It's just a matter of time before even more content arrives that way, as well. But to do it properly, you need a capture card that can handle the extreme influx of all of that data. 4K shooting requires huge amounts of storage space, and also, a memory card with tons of bandwidth to handle all of the I/O transmissions.

That's where Toshiba comes in. The company has just announced a new 4K-ready, 160MB/s CompactFlash card, designed to cater to 4K-equipped DSLRs and video recorders. It's slated to become the world's fastest class of CF cards, slotted into the EXCERIA PRO series, and it should go on sale in the coming days for those in Japan. Sales will also follow in Asia, Europe and North America. The initial line-up of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB cards offers the world's highest level read and write speeds, but we're quite interested in knowing why higher capacity cards aren't being made available at launch. 4K shooting takes up a ton of space, so it looks like those who adopt these cards will be swapping them fairly frequently.


The new cards are compliant with the CompactFlash Association (CFA) standard CompactFlash® Specification Revision 6.1 and compatible with the UDMA7 high speed interface, ensuring they can support high performance DSLRs to the full. VPG-65 enables 4K resolution (a digital movie file format with horizontal resolution of approx. 4,000 pixels and vertical resolution of approx. 2,000 pixels) movie shooting and high quality Full HD video capture at high frame rates with no dropped frames.

Too bad there's no mention of a price; we're guessing it'll be very, very expensive right out of the gate.