SanDisk has pegged the data transfer meter for SDHC with the announcement today of the Extreme III 30MB/s SD card. The 30MB/s edition (megabytes per second) will come to market in September and will be available in 4GB, 8GB and a whopping 16GB. The 16GB version will have a selling price of $179.99.

The speed of the camera's recording media correlates directly to the number of frames that can be written during a continuous burst—before a memory buffer overrun occurs. Here’s an example from Canon’s 50D literature.

It can shoot up to 6.3 fps, in bursts of up to 90 JPEGs (using an UDMA CF card), 60 JPEGs (using a CF card) consecutively or 16 RAW files, so you'll never, ever miss a shot.

Though the 50D uses only CF (compact flash) cards, Nikon’s newly announced D90 will be able to use the Extreme III 30MB/s cards. According to the press release, Nikon and SanDisk have been working closely to ensure that the D90 will take full advantage of the 30MB/s data transfer rate.

Though the Canon EOS 1D MKIII and EOS1Ds MKIII both have SD recording slots, the DIGIC III processor in these cameras will pump out only 15MB/s. Perhaps the next two Canon pre-Photokina camera announcements will be equipped with DIGIC 4 image processors, able to take advantage of the SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s edition.

— Ken Geiger

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