As the CP+ announcements start to gather pace, Sony has just announced that they have created the World’s fastest SD card. The new SF-G series are SDXC, with UHS II U3 compatibility. They offer up to 299MB/s write speeds, and 300Mb/s read speeds, with capacities of 32, 64 and 128GB. The new cards are great for 4K video, but photographers can also benefit from longer continuous shooting bursts. With such fast write speeds a cameras buffer memory should clear faster, meaning that you can get back to shooting faster than ever before.

A new memory card reader, the Sony MRW-S1, will also be available to deal with the fast read and write speeds, with it having a built-in USB 3.1 connection. The cards will be available in March, and we are currently awaiting word of pricing, but don’t expect them to be cheap. Meanwhile the card reader will available in April.

The cards are capable of capturing video data that is far in excess of what the current range of Sony cameras can record. As a comparison 299MB/s is 2392Mb/s, whilst Sony’s 4K video, in its consumer line only has a data rate of 100Mb/s. However, if the rumours of a A7R III with a 80-million-pixel sensor are true, it would produce 14-bit raw files that were around 140MB (based on Adobe DNG format as an example), which would be where the cards would come in to their own.