Several companies have launched huge memory cards at CES and here's just a piece of the action.

SDHC, the most prolific of all the current standards, got its first 32GB card, compliments of Panasonic. It's also a fast Class 6 card, with transfer rates of up to 20MB/s, or X133 in old SD speeds. Panasonic claims you can store as much as 5 hours and 20 minutes of 1920 x 1080i HD video on it. It's ridiculous to even mention the number of photos you can store on this behemoth, as the vast majority of new cameras record in 8-12 megapixels with picture sizes ranging from 4 to 6 megabytes. No word on price yet, but don't expect it to be cheap.

Lexar launched an 8GB Class 6 SDHC card, but there's a catch. Although it's classified as a Class 6 card, it exceeds the Class 6 20MB/s speed; in fact, it's capable of a minimum sustained write speed in excess of 20MB/s, well north of the Class 6 standard.



Sony pushed its MS PRO Duo to 16GB. Although the most expensive of all contemporary memory card standards, this baby does have a market. PSP lovers will appreciate the huge capacity, especially PSP lovers with a tendency to play pirated games. Too bad Sony's tiny M2 cards, used in SonyEricsson phones, are still lagging behind when it comes to capacity, as Walkman users always crave more storage.

Pretec launched several Compact Flash cards, ranging in capacity from 16 to 48GB. The biggest 48GB model boasts a transfer rate of 333x (50 MB/sec), and with growing dSLR sales these cards still have a future, although the SDHC is catching up, both in terms of capacity and speed.