INTRODUCTION

   When out to get a brand new memory card for our digital cameras, smartphones, tablets, car stereos and even MP3/MP4 players most consumers don't really care much about performance and so price and capacity are usually the two decisive factors. Still demanding users and professionals alike almost always look to equip their brand new devices/equipment with the fastest possible memory cards and so for them price usually comes third after performance and capacity. Recently the SD Association announced their new standard called SD Express which according to them by adding PCI Express and NVMe interfaces can boost performance of SD cards to an impressive data transfer rate of up to 985MB/s (roughly 3 times faster compared to the fastest models available today) with a capacity of up to 128TB (64 times larger compared to what we have today - 2TB). Because of this we decided to start a whole new reviews section by doing a comparison between the latest Canvas series of cards released by Kingston and the latest Exceria series of cards released by Toshiba.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Toshiba Memory Europe GmbH (TME) is the European business of the Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC). Our company offers a broad product line of high-end flash memory products, including SD Cards, USB sticks, micro SDs and embedded memory components, in addition to solid state drives (SSD). TME maintains offices in Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

   For today’s comparison we got the Kingston Canvas Select, Go and React cards (both SD and Micro SD models - covered by a lifetime warranty) and the Toshiba M203, Exceria M303 and Exceria M402 Pro cards (micro SD with SD adapters - covered by a limited 5 year warranty). In order for our comparison to be as fair as it can possibly be we got the 128GB variants of all the cards mentioned and since some of you have asked in the past in order to check for possible performance differences between capacities we also got the 256GB variant of the Canvas Select micro SD card. These are currently the fastest cards both Kingston and Toshiba currently have in their product portfolio and although they are not the fastest ones around as you will also see later on the do very well and some of them can be easily used even for 4k recording (as advertised).