[IMG]http://dpnow.com/files/blog/P4205316.jpg[/IMG]
[I]An 8MB SD card c.2000. The new Lexar 128GB SDXC card has a capacity almost sixteen and a half thousand times that of the original 8MB SD card.[/I]

Lexar has just announced that it is shipping 128GB SDXC memory cards, the largest capacity you can get. This snippet of news might just wash over you, but I think it's worth a little consideration.

My laptop has a 250GB hard disk - so a postage stamp sized 128GB SDXC memory card has more than half the capacity of my laptop hard drive.

Back in 2000 I attended a press conference at the big IT trade show, CeBIT, held annually in Hanover, Germany. This was the official European launch of the SD card format, with cards up to 32MB just starting to ship at the time, and 64MB promised for later in the year. Heady stuff!

At the time the SD card roadmap extended to 2GB cards within 5 years. There was a lot of cynicism at the time to the effect: "Will we need 2GB cards?" and "They will never be able to fit 2GB into an SD card," and how wrong they were. Most of us think of 2GB cards as being rather modest, with 8GB and even 16GB cards now plentiful and affordable.

While still digital cameras have driven the increase in memory card capacity, smartphones and digital video (often using so-called still cameras) is now the main driving force for super high capacity cards like the new Lexar 128GB SDXC cards.

The question now is, where do we go from here? We're already used to terabyte hard drives, and a terabyte memory card is 'only' 8 times the capacity of a 128GB card...