Samsung's new memory card designed for high-res images, drones

Samsung Electronics is now working to serve the drone market. The company has developed a removable memory card for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices, specifically DSLRs, 3D virtual reality cameras, action cams and drones. The cards will provide drone operators with storage capacities ranging from 32 to 256 gigabytes. 256 gigabytes is equivalent to the memory on a solid-state drive computer that has the footprint of roughly a credit card. 

“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, memory product planning and application engineering for Samsung. 

The new high-capacity UFS card line-up is “changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all,” Lee added. 

The new Samsung card will improve movie playback. According to the company, it will provide more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card. The system will also read a 5GB, full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, as opposed to the 50 second time frame needed with a microSD card. 

The 256GB UFS card also significantly reduces multimedia downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, a function that will be beneficial to DSLR camera users, Samsung said. Large JPEG photos (1,120 MB) shot with the Samsung 256 UFS will take less than seven seconds compared to the microSD version that requires 32 seconds.