By Ron Eggers

September 30, 2004 — SanDisk Corp. introduced yesterday at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, the latest versions of its Ultra II line of flash memory cards. The quadrupled-speed cards include an 8 GB CompactFlash Type I card, a 4 GB Ultra II Memory Stick PRO card and a 2 GB Ultra II PRO SD card.

With a minimum write speed of nine megabytes per second and a minimum read speed of 10 megabytes a second, the new cards are designed and targeted for serious amateur and professional photographers that shoot with 4-megapixel or higher resolution digital cameras. The 8 GB CompactFlash Type I card, for instance, can store up to 2304 8-megapixel JPEG images that were been created on a Canon PowerShot Pro I.

The top-of-the-line SanDisk Ultra II memory cards will be available in November, in the CompactFlash, Memory Stick PRO and SD formats. The 8 GB Ultra II CompactFlash card is expected to list for $959.99; the 4 GB Ultra II MemoryStick PRO, $959.99, and the 2 GB Ultra II SecureData card, $239.00.

(Contact Ron Eggers at Newswatch@earthlink.net)