The SD Association announces new UHS Speed Class 3 for SD cards

This morning the SD Association announced the all new Ultra High Speed (UHS) Speed Class 3 (U3) alongside a new designation symbol to identify products capable of recording 4K2K videos. This new speed class and symbol will be featured exclusively on SDXC UHS-I and UHS-II memory cards and devices and SDHC UHS-I and UHS-II memory cards and devices.

"The world's favorite SD memory card continues to evolve and meet shifting industry needs," said Brian Kumagai, president of the SD Association. "Our new UHS Speed Class 3 standard will give consumers and businesses more flexibility and capability as the market shifts to 4K2K video formats. Both SDXC and SDHC memory card standards already offer the massive storage needed to support 4K2k video with enough room to store photos, music, documents and other data on a single portable card."

The new UHS U3 compatible SD cards will feature a lightening fast 30Mb/second sustained minimum write speed which is critical when shooting ultra high resolution 4K2K video. This new speed standard will also facilitate faster write times in high-megapixel DSLR cameras as well as high-bitrate audio recording devices. New devices offering the UHS Speed Class 3 will be backwards compatible and will work with existing SD memory cards.

UHS Bus Symbols:

UHS-I and UHS-II symbols indicate bus interface for data transfer. UHS Speed Class symbols, such as U1 and U3, indicate minimum write speeds for real-time video recording.

• UHS- I bus speed makes the massive storage found on SDXC and SDHC memory cards manageable and even more portable. This symbol is used on SDXC and SDHC products capable of supporting data transfer speeds between the memory card and the device of up to 104 Megabytes per second. Users should pair their devices with memory cards having the same symbol for optimum performance.
• UHS-II bus speed makes the massive storage found on SDXC and SDHC manageable and even more portable. This symbol is found on SDXC and SDHC products capable of supporting data transfer speeds between the memory card and the device of up to 312 Megabytes per second. Users should pair their devices with memory cards having the same symbol for optimum performance.

UHS Speed Class Symbols:

UHS Speed Class symbols are found on SDXC and SDHC products with either UHS- I or UHS-II symbols. The U1 denotes a 10 Megabytes per second minimum write speed, and U3 denotes 30 Megabytes per second minimum write speed. Users will achieve optimum video recording performance by pairing their devices with the appropriate SDXC or SDHC memory cards with the same marks.