Secure Digital (SD)

The SD card is the only format featured twice in this guide, which highlights the convergence of photography and video, as well as the dominance of SD cards in our digital world. The role of the SD card in digital photography is explained in the next section, but it also plays an important role in video. After a series of film reels and cassette formats, the transition to digital video demanded a small, fast storage format to handle large, high-resolution digital video files. The SD card was introduced in 1999, but it wasn’t until around 2005 that SD cards were used to capture high-definition video directly from a digital video camera.

SD and MicroSD cards are now commonly used in handheld video cameras and action cameras like the GoPro. These small and durable cards can store hours of 4k video on a memory card the size of a postage stamp. There are many cards with the same physical format but different markings such as SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity), SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity), and SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity). All these formats can be read with the same card reader, and the only practical difference between these cards is their capacity and transfer speeds.

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