Many portable electronic devices that are used today store data from office documents to music and video files using SD storage in the form of full-size SD cards and microSD cards. The association that promotes the SD format — the SD Card Association — announced a new standard today for Embedded SD storage.

The new standard would allow manufacturers to embed SD memory inside devices like cameras, phones, and MP3 players. The new specification allows makers to build devices that have internal and external storage using the same specifications.

Today SanDisk has likely pleased at least a few more professionals in the digital photography and videography world with the introduction of the new 32GB Extreme III CF card. Not only have they doubled the capacity of the largest CompactFlash card SanDisk previously had available, but they’ve also bumped the read/write speed up from 20 MB/second to 30 MB/second with this new item.

Anyone that heavily uses memory cards for digital cameras or video cameras can appreciate how nice it is to have more storage in a single card, and upping the transfer rate by 50% makes the decision to get the larger 32GB CF card just that much easier. Sure you can generally get an SDHC card for a little less money and they are a little bit smaller, but the transfer rate is what will make a difference. The Kingston 32GB SDHC card for example can hold just as much, but moving the card’s entire capacity of data is the difference between about 18 minutes for the SanDisk CF and 2.2 hours for the Kingston SDHC.

The storage capacity of SDHC cards is growing greater all the time. I can remember only a few short years ago a 2 GB SDHC card was huge. Today that amount of storage will hold but a few full resolution photos from my DSLR camera. Things are even worse if you try to record HD video from my camcorder that uses SDHC storage.

Kingston announced the perfect SDHC storage card today for users of HD camcorders that record to SDHC cards. The new SDHC Elite Pro card from Kingston has 32 GB of storage. Kingston says 32 GB is enough storage for 6000 full 10-megapixel resolution digital images or over eight hours of full HD video recorded at 6 Mbps.

HD Camcorders are fast becoming the norm and tapes are growing ever rarer for storing digital video. Canon added three new camcorders to its VIXIA HD camcorder line up this week that all have the same 1080p resolution and record to internal memory.

All three camcorders record at 24Mbps bit rate in AVCHD format — the highest bit rate available for the AVCHD format. The VIXIA HF11 Dual Flash memory camcorder can record up to 12 hours of HD video to 32GB of internal flash memory. It also features a SDHC card slot for more recording space when needed.

Camcorders have steadily come down in price to the point where they are nearly disposable. Many low cost camcorders produced today record video digitally in formats that are compatible and easy to upload to services like YouTube online. Samsung unveiled its latest camcorder today aimed at YouTube users called the SC-MX20.

The camcorder features a 680K pixel CCD sensor and can record video at a resolution of 720 x 480 with good color and clarity. The SC-MX20 has a 34x optical zoom lens to let you get up close from afar. Samsung integrates optical image stabilization and Face Detection into the camera as well.

Creative has revealed some snazzy new color options for their ZEN iPod-rival. Behold the eye-catching pink and red versions. These look juicy in bubble gum colors. Other then the color, the PMP is identical to existing ZEN models. So, you’ll get the same 2.5-inch, 320 x 240, 16m color TFT display, choice of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or 32GB flash storage and SD/SDHC expansion.

The ZEN also has an FM radio and microphone for voice recordings, is compatible with multiple audio and video formats (MP3, WMA, AAC (. M4A), WAV (ADPCM), Audible 2,3,4, MJPEG, WMV9, MPED4-SP, DivX 4 / 5 and XviD) and has a photo viewer (JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG & TIFF). It can also handle TIVO-to-go files, from PVR. File transfer is with a USB 2.0 connection. Battery life is about 25hrs audio playback or about 5hrs video. Nothing on price or availability yet, but the red ZEN has been seen on Buy.com, the pink is apparently a Walmart exclusive.

NextoDi brought a couple of new products to the PMA show in Las Vegas this year with one of them being an upgraded media storage device with support for eSATA drives and just about every media card you can think of. Until you get your hands on a few 32GB media cards the Nexto Extreme ND2700 works well for transferring and storing data from the smaller media in your digital camera and camcorder while on the go.

The ND2700 also uses NextoDI’s X-Copy technology delivering backup speeds as fast as 40 seconds for 1GB. The USB connection makes transferring data even easier by connecting to your camera directly without having to remove the media card. A sampling of those media cards supported by the Nexto Extreme include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC and a whole array of Memory Sticks. NextoDI didn’t have any information quite yet on pricing or availability.

SanDisk upped their available SDHC card capacity today by putting 32GB of flash memory in the latest to the line of Ultra II SDHC cards. This new 32GB flash card reads and writes at 15MB/second, which is a nice increase from the 10MB/second found previously from the Ultra II’s.

This card to date is the largest flash memory card put out by SanDisk and brings them in line with the most capacity available in an SDHC card in the industry. This kind of storage can put as much as 4 hours of 1536 kbps MPEG-4 video or around 8,000 digital photos on a card not much larger than your thumbnail.

Today SanDisk, the original inventor of flash memory cards, has introduced a 4GB microSDHC card. The significance of this release lies in the fact that this microSD card is the largest capacity to date for the smallest model of removable flash memory cards.

The 4GB capacity of the microSD also kicks it the tiny memory card into the microSDHC realm, defined by a new SD 2.00 specification that applies to any microSD card larger than 2GB. The new specification is required for capacities from 4GB to 32GB by the …