SD cards have become a de facto standard format for media in most devices, with a couple holdouts (namely Sony, which predictably uses a proprietary format). As such, the format has grown and there's been quite a bit of innovation effort focused in the SD arena.

A couple of announcements made this week at the CES show in Las Vegas are worth paying attention to. In one announcement, we learn that the SD format will support massively larger storage. In the other announcement, a popular WiFi-enabled SD card gains some nifty new video-handling features.

SDXC means on-card storage increase to a theoretical 2 terabytes

The SD Association announced a new standard (links to PDF file) that will soon have us leveraging massively larger storage capabilities (with much higher purchase prices, one would have to assume - we will have to see what the economies of scale bring us):

"The new SDXC specification provides up to 2 terabytes storage capacity and accelerates SD interface read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second."

That's some serious storage and speed. Photographers and HD videographers can soon rejoice. Just don't lose your little 2-terabyte card. Of course, it's likely that new devices will be needed to support the new standard. The SD Association says the SDHC, Embedded SD and SDIO specifications will also benefit from the new SD interface speeds. I'd be very (and pleasantly) surprised if we can take advantage of the larger storage capabilities in existing devices.

New Eye-Fi SD cards will allow direct HD uploads to YouTube

Eye-Fi already has a great thing going with their SD cards that use WiFi to transfer digital images, and now they're previewing a new card technology that will allow you to directly transfer your HD video content straight from the card to YouTube via WiFi. Now that's cool. I really want one of those for use in my Kodak Zi6 HD camera, and I'd use it in my full-sized HD camera, too. The power-requirement questions rattling around in my head will have to be answered at a later date, and I hope it will handle video as well as still images on the same card. Unfortunately they're not available yet, and no date was set for release. But I, for one, will definitely be watching for this.