Remember the good ol' days of the 1990s and early 2000s? You could fit maybe a couple photos on a floppy disc, and early digital cameras held only as many photos as you can count on two hands. We certainly don't live in such a world anymore: Western Digital, the parent company of the SD card company SanDisk, revealed the prototype for an SD card with one terabyte of memory at the Photokina 2016 photography show Tuesday.
If that storage capacity is a little difficult to wrap your head around, consider that one terabyte can store…
Of course, depending on what your file sizes are, mileage may vary — for example, if taken at a low quality, a terabyte could squeeze in as many as 2 million photos.
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The card won't be for the casual photographer just yet — it is being built primarily for people working with "memory-heavy formats, including 4K and 8K footage, 360-degree video and VR," The Verge writes. It will also be very, very expensive, although a price and release date haven't been announced just yet.
Still, it was only 16 years ago that SanDisk released its first 64 megabyte SD card. "Just a few short years ago the idea of a 1TB capacity point in an SD card seemed so futuristic — it's amazing that we're now at the point where it's becoming a reality," Sam Nicholson, the CEO of Stargate Studios, said.
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