Sony along with the Compact Flash association have announced the XQD standard in memory cards which will make their debut with the upcoming Nikon D4 camera. The cards have a high speed memory controller which allows read and write operations at 1GBps (s 125 Mb) which will allow the Nikon D4 to shoot at 100 fps in RAW format. Theoretically the card can support upto 5GBps read / write operations and the capacity can be scaled all the way upto 2 Terabytes. Supporting the XQD is the MRW-E80 card reader which supports USB 3.0 and will retail for $40.

The Sony XQD memory cards will go on sale from February 15 with in 16GB ($ 200) and 32GB ($ 320) capacities respectively.