SanDisk, Nikon and Sony have developed a new specification for a faster breed of memory cards, Compact Flash cards to be exact.

Unlike previous CF standards, the new cards should use the PCI Express interface capable of delivering transfers speeds of up to 500MB/s. This is a massive improvement over the latest CF 6.0 standard, which delivers 167MB/s. Of course, it’s up to SanDisk and other memory makers to come up with speedy memory that can fully utilize the potential of PCIe speeds, but the new standard could mark a major milestone in digital imaging.

It could allow massive bursts of RAW images, but more importantly it has the potential to deliver even more flexibility and performance for resource hungry video in 4K and perhaps even higher resolutions.