Now, I’m not really sure if they’re going the propriety route with this latest “innovation”, but it certainly seems that way. Panasonic has just unveiled a new flash card standard, dubbed the SDHC, which bears a striking resemblance to existing Secure Digital (SD) cards on the market.

In fact, other than the “HC” found on the sticker, just below the standard SD logo, you really can’t tell the two cards apart. You can probably fit an SDHC card into a standard SD slot, maybe in one of those multi-card readers, but I can tell you right now that it won’t work.

The data transfer rate has been reported in the 5MB/sec range, and while they probably offer other capacities as well, they’re pushing the 4 gigger, which fetches $262 (plus taxes, of course) when they ring you up at the till.

Please Panasonic, don’t become the next Sony where your devices are pretty nifty and get us to drool over them, only to tell us that the media format they take – the only media format that they take – is a propriety piece that won’t work with any of our other gear. The last thing we need is another Memory Stick or UMD.