The SD Association has announced a new extension to the SD card specification called SDXC (eXtended Capacity) which is set to bring the humble SD card into the next generation of storage mediums. With reported capacities of up to 2TB in the future and read and write speeds of up to 300MB/s, it looks like SDXC has some real potential.

However, for now, don't expect to see anything that big, although Panasonic has already announced that they want to release a 64GB card as soon as possible. The first SDXC cards will be 32GB models and sadly the performance won't be as fast either. Nonetheless, early SDXC cards are expected to offer read and write speeds of 104MB/s this year, which is still over three times as fast as current SDHC cards.

On the downside, don't expect SDXC cards to work with your current camera as they're using the new Microsoft exFAT file system which isn't backwards compatible with older devices. However, it is compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and the file system has been specifically designed for flash media according to the press release.

So far no pricing has been revealed even for the 32GB SDXC cards, but we expect them to be fairly pricey, at least to start with.

You can find the full press release here (PDF), and Panasonics press release here