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Toshiba announced it's reached the 32GB frontier with SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) flash memory cards, a successor to the widely used SD format that extends to bigger sizes.

Toshiba's SDHC flash cards will reach 32GB by January

(Credit: Toshiba)

Don't get too excited, though. The 32GB card won't go on sale until January. But a 16GB model will show up in October.

A lot of folks with digital cameras have trouble filling up a 1GB SD card, but high capacities are useful. For one thing, they make flash-based video cameras more feasible. For another, some people like to leave libraries of photos on their cameras so they can hold impromptu slide shows. And some high-end cameras, such as Canon's new EOS-1Ds Mark III, support SDHC as well as the bulkier but currently higher-capacity CompactFlash standard. That's a 21.1-megapixel camera, and its users are likely to shoot unprocessed "raw" files that are roughly three times the size of a JPEG, so it'll gobble up 32GB in a studio shoot in no time flat.

Toshiba also announced an 8GB microSDHC--a smaller format that uses the same communication protocols--that will ship in January. Toshiba sells the NAND flash memory chips themselves as well as flash memory cards.

Also Wednesday, Delkin Devices announced a new batch of CompactFlash cards--1GB costing $80, 2GB for $110, 4GB for $180 and 8GB for $300. Their claim to fame: 305x transfer rates, or 45MB per second. Of course, that's the maximum speed for offloading data to your PC--digital cameras rarely can get anywhere close. But that's slowly changing too--the 1Ds Mark III supports the same high-speed Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA) transfer technology as the new Delkin cards.

Delkin also announced a UDMA flash card reader that works via CardBus or FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports, with a ExpressCard version in the works.

Flash memory cards, along with digital cameras, sounded the death knell for traditional film cameras and dealt a serious blow to companies like Kodak and Fuji that depended on that industry.

So it's ironic that Kodak was one of the two companies that commissioned the CompactFlash card. (Canon was the other.) The format, coined in 1994, was the first successful flash card. Kodak had made a digital camera but the storage device inside of it made the camera big and bulky. The company, along with Canon, then commissioned SanDisk to come up with something smaller. The CompactFlash card was the result, way back in the '90s, according to SanDisk CEO Eli Harari.

Ultimately, Casio, not Kodak, had the first commercial success with digital cameras and many other companies, but not Kodak, made piles of money on flash cards. Kodak tried to do its own branded memory cards too, but was late.

"They had it all," Harari said.

Some subset of photographers would like a compact camera with lots of higher-end features and manual controls. But a vastly larger quantity want their cameras to take photos with the correct focus, exposure, white balance and other factors without having to do more than press the shutter button.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18

(Credit: Panasonic)

Which is why Panasonic's three newest cameras, the Lumix FX-33, FX-55 and FZ18 are notable. For one thing, Panasonic is catching up with competitors such as Fujifilm and Canon by introducing face detection, which lets the camera guess more intelligently about what the photographer is trying to shoot and adjust settings accordingly. But more novel is what Panasonic calls Intelligent Scene Selector.

Intelligent Scene Selector, if switched on, replaces a common set of broad parameters that otherwise must be manually activated. It lets the camera take its best guess about whether the scene is one of five modes: portrait, landscape scenery, macro close-up, night scenery and night portrait, said Alex Fried, Panasonic's national marketing manager for imaging in North America. And when the camera is in portrait modes, it uses the face-detection technology for further refinement.

"All that takes place without touching a button," Fried said. "Consumers don't utilize scene modes to their fullest capability. A lot don't go that deep into the manual or into the menus."

All three of the new cameras feature the face detection and automatic scene selection as well as two earlier technologies, Panasonic's Mega OIS, which shifts the image sensor to counteract camera shake, and Intelligent ISO, which increases the camera's sensitivity to try to deal with moving subjects. Boosting ISO lets the camera use a shorter exposure to freeze action better, but it produces more off-color speckles called image noise.

Collectively, Panasonic calls the four features Intelligent Auto Mode. I suppose camera makers can be excused for attaching official names to their features, and now metafeatures, in the effort to distinguish their models from the herd. But I fear it causes brand exhaustion among camera buyers.

As my comrade Will Greenwald noted on our Crave blog, the three new cameras are 8-megapixel models due in September and sporting zoom ranges that begin at a nice 28mm wide angle. The FX33 and FX55 are smaller, with 3.6x zoom lenses and LCDs measuring 2.5 inches and 3 inches, respectively. The FZ18 has a huge 18x zoom range, a notch longer than the predecessor FZ8, which began at 35mm and spanned a 12x zoom range. And for control freaks, it offers manual control and raw image support, Fried said. Prices, in ascending order, are about $300, $350 and $400.

Sweden has the world's most "responsibly competitive" companies, according to a State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007 report released on Friday.

The report, issued by the London-based think thank AccountAbility, graded countries based on corporate responsibility issues like environment, climate change, anti-corruption and human rights.

Nordic countries reached the top four positions, with Denmark, Finland and Iceland following No. 1 Sweden. Those were followed by Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia and Canada. The U.S. was lower on the list but managed to make the top 20.

The report was released during the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit on corporate citizenship being held in Geneva on Thursday and Friday. Hundreds of business, government and civil workers met at the summit to talk about unifying principles of social responsibilities.

The Responsible Competitiveness study covered 108 countries, which were given points for each responsible business practice, such as carbon dioxide emissions and human rights policies.

The report, with a foreword by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, aims to be a guide for policy makers and business leaders looking to be more competitive through responsible corporations. The study also shows that by not being responsibly competitive, countries can miss out on their share of a future market worth as much as $750 billion by 2050.

Kodak's Z1275 with 2.5-inch LCD screen

(Credit: Eastman Kodak)

In addition to its new M series of budget compact cameras, Kodak announced an ultrazoom compact and a high-megapixel compact for its Z series line of digital cameras on Tuesday.

Both cameras, set to be available this August for about $249, have Kodak's digital-image stabilization feature to assist with camera shake.

Kodak's Z1275 offers an impressive 12 megapixels for $249. (In this price range, 10 megapixels is on the better side of average.)

The Z1275 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen and will stitch together photos for one panoramic, a fun feature to have on board. It also has 64MB of internal memory in addition to an SDHC/SD/MMC card slot.

Kodak's ZD710

(Credit: Eastman Kodak)

For what it's worth, Kodak claims that this camera has an ISO sensitivity of up to 1,600, with a 3,200 boost, depending on which mode you are shooting in and the size of the photo.

The ZD710, as the name and body suggests, is the obvious predecessor to the Kodak Z710 as it also has a 10x optical-zoom lens that offers the 38mm to 380mm (35mm equivalent) range.

Unlike the Z710, however, which we at CNET complained had no optical image stabilization and an ISO of only 400 with an 800 boost, the new ZD710 does have Kodak's digital-image stabilization and offers an ISO up to 1,600.

While digital-image stabilization is not the same as optical-image stabilization, it's a start.

Kodak's ZD710 with 2-inch LCD screen

(Credit: Eastman Kodak)

The ZD710 also comes with the typical SDHC/SD/MMC memory card slot, scene modes, color modes, video capability and shooting modes for partial manual control typical of a camera in this class.

As is the problem on many of these cameras caught between the compact and dSLR worlds, the ZD710 has only a 2-inch LCD screen in order to fit in a control wheel.

While the rumor mill surrounding a new Nikon release for DSLR consumers "hots up," as the British press would say, Kodak is addressing its amateur photographer base.

The new M-series budget-priced compact cameras offer color choice, portability, nice LCD screen size and megapixels high enough to make 30x40 inch prints.

Kodak's M753 in copper

(Credit: Eastman Kodak)

Notably, these are not the cameras and cell phones with Kodak's own CMOS chips that Kodak President Antonio Perez mentioned we would soon see. Those 5-megapixel cameras are due to come out "in time for the holiday season."

The M753 available now for $149 is a 7-megapixel 0.9-inch slim camera with a 2.5-inch LCD screen and SD/MMC slot that comes in color choices of black, silver, purple, copper, pink and blue. It's counterpart, the 8-megapixel M853, will be available in August for about $179. Also with a 2.5-inch LCD screen, the M853 comes in white, red, graphite, silver and espresso. Both have a 3x optical zoom lens.

Kodak's M883 in red

(Credit: Eastman Kodak)

For a little more, you can get a compact camera with a 3-inch LCD screen (go for it) and face detection technology with your 8 megapixels in the M883. It'll be available for $229 this September in silver, black or red. Not willing to pay the extra $30 for a bigger screen and face detection? There's the 8-megapixel M873 for $199 that also comes in a metal alloy body in silver or black. Sorry, no red.