The market for rugged cameras receives far less attention than the regular cameras and accessories, and that is understandable. However, Sony is bringing a new kind of SD card to this territory, a product which aims to be more reliable in much more extreme conditions.
You would think that the good old SD card would be pretty reliable as it stands, but Sony would disagree. The new SF-G series’ TOUGH SD cards also come without the breakable parts, like the rib in between the circuitry and the write protection switch.
In a bend test, the card can withstand 180N of force, compared to 10N of a regular card.
The design features no empty space within it. There is environmental protection via IPX8 certification, which allows you to dunk the card in a meter of water, or drop it from a height of 5 meters. There is also dust, temperature, magnet, anti-static, X-ray and UV protection.
It begs the question as to why would rugged cards even be a thing, as the SD cards are usually inside a camera or your laptop/PC when transferring videos or images, which makes them unlikely to face punishment of any kind. Still, it should be a good option if you keep breaking your SD cards or if you’re the clumsy type.
Fast Speeds
It’s heartening to see that such efforts haven’t impacted the transfer speeds, and if anything it’s the opposite. The SF-G cards support the newer flash memory standard of UHS-II, with a read speed of up to 300MB/s, with write speed being a hair behind at 299MB/s, which is impressive in any capacity.
Talking of capacity, the cards will be available in 32, 64 and 128 GB of storage, with pricing and availability set to be announced later on.
Via Peta Pixel
