At the PMA 08 international photography convention in Las Vegas, SanDisk announced on Thursday three new products designed for camcorders and digital cameras: an 8 GB Ultra II Plus SDHC card, and 16 B and 32 GB SDHC Ultra II cards.

The 8 GB Plus card offers both SDHC and USB functionality in one card. The card features a hinge that can be opened and inserted directly into the USB port on any computer. SanDisk states that the hinge is both convenient and resilient, having survived over 10,000 open/close cycles in durability testing. The 8 GB SDHC card will has an MSRP of $99.99 and is expected to be available in March.

The term “SDHC” means Secure Digital High Capacity, the High Capacity reference is given a refreshed meaning by the introduction of the 16GB card and particularly the 32 GB card. According to SanDisk, the 32 GB Ultra II SDHC card will be able to store more than 8,000 high-resolution pictures or up to 40 hours of video (depending, obviously, on formatting options).

Of course, if you’re storing video, or even storing photos taken in rapid succession, extra capacity is useless if your memory card can’t keep up with your data input speed. Both the 16 GB and 32 GB cards appear ready for this challenge, with 15 MB/s read and write speed, a significant increase from the 9 MB/s write speed and 10MB/sec read speed of lower capacity SanDisk Ultra II memory cards.

The SanDisk MicroMate USB 2.0 Reader is packaged with both the 16 GB and 32 GB cards. The 16 GB card with reader has an MSRP of $179.99 an is expected to be available in March, the 32 GB card with reader has an MSRP of $349.99 and is “slatted for shipping in April”, wording which may imply that it won’t actually hit retail store shelves until May.