Mumbai, September 22, 2014: Ultra High Definition (HD) or 4K, may soon overtake HD as the preferred way for people to watch TV and movies at home. 4K TV sets are expected to sell well this Diwali season and 4K TV services will begin rolling out in India in 3-4 months.
It's time to start shooting your next shaadi-ka-video in 4K and there are at least 6 makes of mobile phones available in India, which allow you to shoot in 4K.
Now comes the problem: 4K as the name suggests is four times sharper, denser than a HD image -- and gobbles up those gigabytes on your phone memory card, for every minute you shoot. 4K Ultra HD video is 4 times the resolution of Full HD video: 8 Mega pixels vs. 2Mega pixels.
Which is why SanDisk last week launched a 4K-friendly phone card, the Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-1-- the world's fastest microSD memory card which transfers data at 95 MB per second. You need this speed to record 4K video without jitter. Under test conditions, the 64 GB version of the Extreme Pro microSDXC card can store 1200 Photos of 13.75MP size + 200 minutes of 4K Ultra HD Video, explained SanDisk engineers at the launch event. It costs Rs 9700 ( 64 GB size) and Rs 4900 ( 32 GB) and comes with a lifetime warranty.
For professional photographers who shoot 4K video or burst mode still pictures in uncompressed RAW format with their digital SLR cameras, SanDisk has also launched the highest capacity ever offered on a camera memory card -- the Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-1 with 512 GB of on board space. The company suggests that 512 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC card can record up to 14 hours of 4K UHS Video and upto 48 hours of full HD video. It costs Rs 51,990.
At the launch event in Mumbai last week, veteran Indian professional photographers Akash Das and Kaustav Saikia explained why the availability of a 512 GB photo card was good news for the art and fashion photographer and cinematographer.
"For me the huge advantage is that I don't have to delete some frames to avoid running out of storage space on my camera, especially since I often shoot stills in burst mode" said Das, "My mantra is 'don't negate, while creating' and these new photo cards will let me do just that!"
"I could now shoot a 4K movie on my mobile phone," Saikia added.
By 2020, the digital universe would encompass 40,000 exabytes -- with 75 billion connected devices uploading 450 million photos everyday, suggested SanDisk's Country Manager for India, Rajesh Gupta.
With Toshiba, SanDisk accounts for half the global market for Flash storage. The US-based company pioneered solid state storage devices in 1991 and was co-founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari, and Sanjay Mehrota, both formerly of Intel, and Jack Yuan, from Hughes Electronics.