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TOKYO -- Matsushita Electric Industrial will unveil at the CEATEC exhibition on Tuesday two new SD (secure digital) memory cards, a 256MB and 512MB card that the company plans to release at the end of this year and the beginning of next year respectively.

They will be the largest-capacity SD cards to date and will be able to transfer data five times faster than the current models, the company says.

These high-volume SD data storage cards are developed especially for digital still camera uses, according to Hiroshi Ryu, a spokesperson for Matsushita, better known for its Panasonic brand name. The cards are for use with high quality four-megapixel to five-megapixel class cameras launched recently by many camera manufacturers, including Matsushita itself.

A 512MB SD card can store up to 400 still images at four-megapixel normal mode resolution, the company says. The data transfer rate of the two new models is five times faster than current models, at 10MB per second.

The 256MB card will be on sale on December 21 in Japan with an expected price of under $251, Ryu says. The 512MB card will be launched on January 21. Both will be shipped worldwide by the second quarter next year, he says.

Matsushita started developing the stamp-size card, which features copyright protection, in conjunction with Toshiba and SanDisk in 1999. The three companies hope to make SD cards the global standard for such memory cards.

Until now, Matsushita has developed up to 64MB SD cards, and is skipping the 128MB cards that have been already released by other vendors, as the demands for high-volume memory cards are increasing, according to Ryu.

Rival Sony's chewing gum size Memory Stick cards are available up to 128MB and the company plans to launch its 256MB card in 2002.

The two SD cards will be exhibited at CEATEC Japan 2001, to be held from October 2 to 6 in Chiba, east of Tokyo.

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