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CD-R In A Digital Camera: The Ueber-Mavica?
"(Now, Sony's announced (OK, preannounced) a new model with a 77mm CD-R drive built in. Several of the digicam sites have picked up on this. Imaging Resource seems to have gotten their hands on a demo unit first, has a bunch of pictures and product shots posted (they're who called it an "Uber Mavica"). Steve of Steve's Digicams is promising a "First Look" later today or tomorrow. Watch his news page for when he posts his take on it. This looks like a big deal in digicamland, because it extends the "no brainer" Mavica appeal into the multi-megapixel world, and eliminates the image-quality penalty in the process. (Of course, true Nerds may choose to wait another year or so until the digicams arrive built around the tiny 500MB micro-optical disks...)"
I'm excited to see a product which may spur sales (and availability!) of 77mm CD-R media, which when last I checked at Recorded Media Supply were available only in fairly large quantities (hundred lots) and cost considerably more than their bigger cousins. But they're so neat! Wanna split an order? ;)
77mm CD's have been around for quite some time, in fact, if you look at you cd-rom drive, there is a cutout for about a three inch disk, most of you probably use this for Oreo cookie storage, but it is actually a 77mm CD slot. I have a Nine Inch Nails 77mm CD from inside the "Broken" case, I've had it since the early nineties.
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
You're right, but your comment ignores the fact that the world is changing, and not just amongst geeks:
Cable and xDSL "modems" have brought 10baseT to millions of homes, and the incredible sales (backordered most places) of gadgets like Linksys' little $150 NAT/Firewall/switch/DHCP server box convince me that this is a market that's rapidly maturing. Not to mention that such a camera would plug in transparently to any LAN, providing value to corporatations and SOHO customers.
Seems like a no-brainer to me: Ethernet silicon is at least as cheap as USB silicon, and you get to completely ignore troublesome drivers in the bargain - forever.
Internet standard interfaces have significant value for all kinds of things, not just networked PCs and servers...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The reason the MiniDisc hasn't caught on more for computers is likely concerns of the audio recording industry (Sony is a big recording company in addition to an electronics vendor). Otherwise, it would be the clear choice of things like the Zip drive and Superdisk.
Unfortunately, those cameras cost about $1000, and you still get crappy battery life.
Get a set of 1600 mAH NiMH rechargeable batteries, minimize your use of the LCD screen (if possible), and you'll get reasonable battery life. With my Kodak DC290, I can take enough high-resolution photos to fill my 64MB CF card (about 100 photos at 1792x1200) using a freshly charged set of NiMH AA cells. I've also run some extremely long time-lapse photos on a single set of batteries: one low-res photo per minute for 5 hours.
I'm not saying that digicams don't suck power -- just that it's a manageable problem.
--jim
Score:5???
Here's an idea: Read the article, realize that they even tried smacking the thing while shooting photos and were unable to prevent it from writing, post something more informed on Slashdot. Just a thought.
The trick is that the camera has a usb port, and when you put the camera in pc mode the pc will just see a usb ls-120 drive with some jpeg's on it. cool huh? no special software required. So far i've only got it to work under 95, no NT, no win2k (yet). If anybody can tell me how to nake this happen in linux, you'll make a new friend
It's a 1.3Mpixel camera. this picture quality is real good, nice zoom. It can take low/high res pictures, low res can be in (extra) zoom mode, a quick 5 shot sequence, or a 10 sec quicktime movie (with sound!) fsckin cool!
the best part is that it lists for about a grand, but i found it for only $600 at www.harmonycomputers.com, they charge too much for shipping, but the total is still at least $100 below the rest.
-earl
p.s. here's my favorite pic favorite pic so far:
Yeah, I have a tough time taking 15-20 pics on my DCS-315 even with the 'long lasting' batteries. What B.S.
I just plug the damn thing into the wall now...
Neo-Luddite? Please. I bought my Mavica because of one overwhelming reason: floppies are highest common denomitor of computer storage media.
I just sold my Amiga. While it was extremely customized and very high-end, there's no way I could expect to use another digicam's proprietary interface with my system. Now, at home, I use Linux and FreeBSD. When I fill a disk, I can pop it into any of my servers or workstations, and instantly view my pictures. No moving weird cables around, no fiddling with arcane drivers, no praying that the manufacturer has actually heard of Unix... I get to concentrate on the content, rather than the media.
That, to me, is important. While I'm perfectly happy at hacking a microcontroller into a toaster, why should I have to screw around just to take a snapshot of my baby? Even more to the point, why should my wife? She's not a neo-Luddite either, but I'm glad that I don't have to teach her about advanced interfacing just so she can look at the pictures she took of her garden.
Finally, floppies make great "film". If I drag a 10-pack with me, I'm guaranteed to have more storage than interest in taking enough pictures to fill it. Furthermore, I'm not always in major metropolitan areas. If I run out of "film", I can grab another 10-pack at the nearest Wal-Mart. Where am I going to get memory cards, or possibly even CD-Rs in a town of 5000?
No, I bought my Mavica because I liked the freedom and flexibility that it offered. I had the money to buy any digicam I wanted, and the technical expertise to hack any of them to work on my systems. However, sometimes it's nice to have something that just works without hours and hours spent.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How could I forget? We have a couple hundred recycled floppies that are destined for the Mavica, and once we use a disk, we don't re-use it, we just keep it as an archival copy. And floppies are indeed cheap, and you can buy them even at a grocery store, if necessary.
I haven't priced flash memory lately, but I'm sure it's not cheap. Same for memory sticks and tiny hard drives.
I do like your idea, though, for a hip-pack. Put a 2.5" (or even 3.5") hard drive in it, and you're good to go.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
It's the Panisonic PalmCam Superdisk, Model PV-SD4090. I has one and am very happy with it. My cost was about $900 with a 2 year "accident" plan. Res is 1280x960 and can take about 800 pictures on one superdisk. If you use the "normal" picture res, you can take over 1500 pics on a disk. Uses a 1250mAh LI-Ion battery that lasts for about 200 pisc (100 flashes). Also can take about 80 to 100 ten second quicktime movies. Other features include red eye flash mode, timer, sound recording, 3x optical zoom, and rapidfire mode (16 640x480 at 2 pics a second).
...but minidiscs 1) are reusable, and 2) would come down in price significantly if there were actually a market for them. If Sony's not going to scrap MD technology, they're going to have to get people to use 'em.
Not that I prefer proprietary technology, I'm just finding it interesting.
You, my fine feathered friend are obviously both a true geek (a compliment!) and not a photographer. While these digital toys are wonderful for the coolness factor, I sincerely doubt that you will be seeing any pro photographers using any of them.
You have two serious misconceptions:
1> You will NEVER be rid of pixelation. (Unless someone finds a way to generate vector images from super-complex life still -- I'm not holding my breath). The whole thing of pixelation is that it is a representation of color and shape made for a grid. You cannot alter this fact.
2> Digital media is not long lasting. How many of you here believe that a CD, hard disk, etc.. will still functio (or even be remotely compatible!) in 100 years. Contrast that to the photos that we have from over 150+ years ago and I think that you'll agree that chemical film is safer and simpler in the long run.
[Disclaimer
Rami James
GUI Dev Guy
--
The thing that makes
rJames.org - illustration
Well, there may have been several reasons for this. First, almost all computers sold have CD-ROM drives in them. I haven't seen a single puter with a minidisc-rom (MD-ROM?) drive. Second, if there's no data spec for the MD's, and no real way to implement it--i.e. no "data type field"--then they shouldn't put data on there.
Of course, my main concern for these things is the CD-R's susceptibility to vibration, and latency for the bloody things. Digital Photography Review had a review of the latest Mavica, and they reported a latency of 15 seconds, per picture after the exposure for the bloody things, when using a flash card. Granted, it's much better while using a floppy, but still, a floppy drive or a CD-R drive aren't the fastest of media these days. That's fine and dandy for portraits and other stills, but for anything else, it makes it kind of obnoxious, if not downright useless, relegating it to the "toys" section.
Nah... who needs battery life?
Reminds me of an old joke about a Russian gentleman with a suitcase, talking to an American tourist. The gist of the joke was that though it was a nice watch, it needed a battery the size of a suitcase. A Lithium-Ion battery is probably a requirement for these beasties, and by the time you have a charger, why not make it a cradle?
seanmeister
I think the technology that will obsolete this sort of thing is high bandwidth next gen mobile phones with low cost/always on data connections. Have one built into your camera and your photos are on your webpage a short while after you press the button. No local storage and no problem if your camera gets broken/stolen. Also when minor celebs snatch the camarea from some photographer and stamp on it, if the bandwidth is high enough, the photo may already be with the paper.
Bob.
I agree about the viewfinder. I wish that it had either a real lens or a pivoting screen.
As far as the movie mode - while I rarely use it, it's great for sending waving babies to the grandparents, or quick 360-degree views of an object (to give a 3D "feel"). Besides, I honestly don't think that the added components amount to much. I mean, if you can already compress to JPG, then MPEG isn't a giant leap. The sound feature is so-so, but once again, I think it was probably cheap enough to add.
Finally, regarding pixellation, my -FD88 does 1280x960. No, it's not film. It's not too shabby, either, though.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Personally, I use the "number pictures sequentially" feature to give every picture I take a unique filename. Then, I use a rotating queue of about 15 floppies as film. Whenever most of the floppies are full, I copy the JPGs into a directory on my file server, quick-format the floppies, and rotate them right back into the film queue.
I regularly backup my hard drive, and keep monthly off-site backups in my safety deposit box. Honestly, I trust that arrangement more than I'd leave any of my valuable pictures to floppy-rot.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have one of the Mavicas with MPEG support. The movie feature is worse than useless. The maximum length movie you can take on mine is 15 seconds, and that eats a goodly portion of the floppy disk storage. What in the hell am I supposed to do with 15 seconds of video? Pass on my memories to people with short attention spans? The only thing that it's good for is party games, like "Film the drunkie" or "wait 'til his wife sees this". Those are fun.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Nah... who needs battery life?
31 shots on my Kodak DC-215 wiped a set of Duracells - and everything on that is solid-state except the zoom bit.
Besides, isn't it curious that they'd push CDR over Minidisc?
Just my 2...
nope, if you have another ls-120 drive (which i don't) you can just put the "superdisk" in there, and go to town.
-earl
Except that those CD-R are Sony specifics, so I doubt they'll be as cheap as 1$ a piece. Plus, 156 MB of storage doesn't mean you can fit as much : since it writes one pic at a time, it must be a multi-session disc... which means huge quantities of wasted space.
...but I mean you can buy a Flash Memory Card -> PC Card adapter for about $10 and move you pics to your laptop (or if you are one of the 8 people who have a desktop with PC Card support). Or you can get a Flash Memory Reader with a USB interface for $50 these days which isn't quite a fast, but is nothing to sneeze at either...
Did I mention the concept is really cool though?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Wasn't there a mavica (or other camera) that at some point had an imation superdisk drive in it instead of a floppy? That seems to be a better solution, because the media is reuslable, cheap, and small. (Plus, quite a few mac owners have superdisk drives because it's often the cheapest way to get a floppy drive on a mac).
If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
So they took a minidisk and put it in a camera? That's not a bad idea. Not a new one though, either. What I'm waiting for is a palm-sized camcorder with jitter-adjustments - just mount it on the side of your head and run a fiber-optic link down to the waist where the actual unit is. Give it the ability to do wireless (ala bluetooth?) transmission to a base unit back at the van. It would revolutionize the way reporting is done. That, and if the price was low enough, I could see the vaporware product of so-called "blackboxes" for automobiles becoming a reality. I, for one, would love to have GPS tracking and stuff on my car - I hate missing my exit. Having my car beep or something (QUIETLY beep) to let me know if I'm about to miss my exit would be *so* cool. And writing out my vehicle's vitals to cd-r would make it easy to prove it was the "other guy" who creamed my car, not the other way around.
Battery life in digital cameras is bad enough as is - let alone how it'll get worse with mechanical equipment like a CD-R (even a small one). You have to spin the motor, operate the servos, and fire the laser in order to write. Combined with everything else (the LCD's suck power too, and so to the CCD's), I really don't see the future of digital photography including floppies or CD's much longer - even the optimized drives like the IBM Microdrives or the Iomega Clik are going to suck more power than flash.
Right now, digital photography is in a flux state anyhow. At the high end, it's been adequate for years (my old company was shooting production ads with digital medium-format backs like the Leaf back 6+ years ago), but the low end is just arriving at the point now where the quality equals what you can get from consumer-grade film.
Unfortunately, those cameras cost about $1000, and you still get crappy battery life.
Digital photography has really taken off the last couple of years, but I won't replace my trusty Nikon until I can buy a 3K x 2K pixel camera with 3x optical zoom, lens switching capability, USB and CF support, and enough battery life to take 150-200 photos on a charge (with flash as needed) for about $500. The feature set is out there today at twice that price. Until then, I'll continue to schlep my handy Apple QuickTake 200 (with 5v Smartmedia) to parties as my only digital device.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
You will NEVER be rid of pixelation.
If the pixels are smaller than film grain then digital cameras win out, however. Pixelation is only a problem when it negatively affects the defninition of images.
Digital media may not be long lasting but digital data IS. You can't back up and restore photos in a lossless manner.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
"I'm excited to see a product which may spur sales (and availability!) of 77mm CD-R media, which when last I checked at Recorded Media Supply were available only in fairly large quantities (hundred lots) and cost considerably more than their bigger cousins."
You can sometimes get these things at computer shows. I picked one up from a KGP Productions PC Show a few months ago. Cost me something like $3-4 for one piece.
The only problem I see with this camera is the 77mm CD-R media -- Sony's going to hear from a lot of people who tried to stick them in their slot-loading drives. Many of these drives will jam when given 77mm media. They can also cause problems with tray-loading drives, if they're not centered on the tray properly the litte CDs can get jammed inside.
Propane?
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I'm reading too many posts where no one read the article.
The model in question DRC-PC100 is indeed a CD-R camera. DO NOT confuse it for DCM-M1, which uses the 640 Megabyte MD-II format.
Although the DCM-M1 camera bests the CRC-PC100 in most areas with it's own ethernet port and webserver it's only a 640K pixel camera... No good for those high quality shutter bugs.
The DRC-PC100 will serve a nitch market, just like the DCM-M1 does. I'd personally love to see a 2 Mega-Pixel version of the DCM-M1.
**First, how will it deal with shaking? Hopefully, well.
This is discussed in the article. They whacked on the camera pretty good during write, and it didn't fail.**
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Ok, smacking a CD writer once, and walking down the road with it are 2 very different things. A new walkman works better than an old one. How is this going to stand up to REAL USE.
**Second, will you have to finish the CD and nullify the oportunity to write more data to it in order to get the pictures off?
This is discussed in the article. The disc must be finalized before it can be read anywhere but in the camera, but the camera also has USB so you can transfer images out that way. **
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In some formats, you can finalize and open a second session. This product hasn't got an official "this is what is going to be built" model yet, which may behave quite diffently
**Third, will it be generic CD-R's, or it gonna be a "memory stick" at the last minute, totally proprietary, and useless in anything buy a sony product.
This, too, is discussed in the article, which you obviously didn't take the time to read before posting. It uses standard 77mm CD-R media, which can be read in just about any CD-ROM drive. **
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Ever hear of a Kodak Photo-CD, didn't really take off, did it? Ever see those CD-RW's labelled especially for MUSIC? They cost 5 times as much... I've been writing music to regular CDs for a long time now, seems to work about the same, doesn't mean that they can't screw with that somehow in order to sell a proprietary product.
**Please, people, take the time to read the article. And moderators, why do you up-moderate posts by people who haven't even bothered to familiarize themselves with the source material? Those are good questions, but they're answered by just doing a little reading.**
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Please, take the time to visit the real world and how real business works. There are plenty of data formats which are all pretty much the same thing. Copy protection on CDs comes in a lot of formats, you might have to have a CD which is only SLIGHTLY different to work in their products, which was pretty much the idea behind the memory stick... To lock your customers in on your products. As for shaking. It's one thing to smack the brand new one. You can put sawdust in parts of a car to make it run better too, for about 5 days...
You are what you do when you count --Steakley
Eh...
The Nikon Coolpix has a viewfinder that rotates independent of the lens/body. And the Coolpix (now up to the 990, 3MegaPix) is pretty consistently rated one of the best by digicam users. See DCResource for more info.
Sorry, no. It's that it takes what is today a supercomputer to encode DVD video and audio in realtime. Even the audio alone would really be cutting it close on today's top-end personal computers. And nothing can write quickly enough if you don't heavily compress it, so that's not an option either.
Sony's camera UI and features are great - easy to use, lots of things to tweak, great zoom, great light level response - but they seem to have trouble with the storage medium. Floppys are cheap and convenient, and the 4X drive is nice and fast, but the image quality is too lousy.
Other solutions? Memory sticks are too proprietary and deficient. CD-R? Why not reusable CD-RW? Why not another storage medium that is smaller and more shock-resistant? SuperDisk, Zip, Iomega's "Clik"... oh yeah, not Sony. Minidisc... there's the shock problem again. DAT... killed off by Big Music. IBM's mini-drive... not Sony again.
Sony needs to get over their proprietary formats (they did "invent" the 3.5" floppy drive), and adopt something more useable in a digital camera. That issue solved, combined with their great camera designs, would be hard to beat.
Oh, yeah, don't CD-R's eat electricity for lunch? Get plenty of spare batteries!
Not really... true Nerds, like Andy Ihnatko, have been taking digital pictures of everything in their line of sight, and writing about it, for years. With better cameras than the Sony, too.
Not many Wintel and Linux people read Ihnatko's stuff, because the old saw, "Macs are for graphics" is often wrongly correlated to "graphics are for Macs"... but his stuff is worth reading if you are interested in this stuff, no matter what platform you use.
Amid his humorous Mac-centric rants, you can find some darn good advice about digital photography (and other gadget lore).
As for Sony using CDR's? Well, every innovation drives down the cost of earlier iterations of any given gadget, meaning that this might make the camera I actually want a little bit cheaper. Even if I don't want the Sony, this is good news to me. :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I want a digital camera integrated with my cell phone. That way, I don't have to store much of the images -- I can just upload as I go. Take it a step further and integrate that with the digital photo album websites out there, and even mom-mom and pop-pop can participate quickly and easily.
--
After all the "click of death" reports on some of the earlier ZIP drives, I wonder which marketing genius thought of that product name....
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Tey ention that as well... seemed to survive being slapped etc as it was writing an image but had to be placed flat for initialising and finalising a disc
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
And I just shelled out buku bucks for their FD-91 35mm camera!
It sucks when even CAMERAS have a product life cycle now!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The NiMH battery in my canon A50 lasts long enough for me. It just has one problem: it always run out when you don't expect it. Tough shit. Easy solution: travel with an extra battery. Problem: I can't buy it anywhere. My brother tried to call Canon and co ... to no avail.
You need to cache 1 or 2 pictures to avoid having to write to the disk in real-time. The compression ratio they're using is about 1MB/picture (160 pix per 156MB disk), so that's 1-2MB. They could either do this with flash, or just use regular RAM (which they need to have for their compression/processing stuff anyway.) RAM is cheaper, but you need to keep it powered while you're using it, so there's a risk of losing the last picture you've taken if you run out of battery, but flash has a limit on how many times you can write to it, which isn't a good thing for the memory that you copy every picture to before saving on disk.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
- weighs less
- costs less
- stores slightly less
- let's you delete crap pictures
and a wealth of other features. I just don't see the point of a CDR in my camera.LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
If you read the review, you'd see that it has a 'steady-shot' system that Sony have been putting in their camcorders for years (works very well in my Hi8).
You would also note the interesting discussion about finalising, what it takes and how to get around it - you can hook up a USB cable and take images off the unfinlaised disc for example.
I wish people would read the articles before posting (and the getting modded up?)
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
There is the Panasonic that writes to a SuperDisk. The camera also serves as an external SuperDisk drive. If you are looking for mega storage, try the Casio with a 340 MB IBM Microdrive.
It seems to me that burning to a small disk would be quite slow compared to these two methods.
First, how will it deal with shaking? Hopefully, well.
Second, will you have to finish the CD and nullify the oportunity to write more data to it in order to get the pictures off?
Third, will it be generic CD-R's, or it gonna be a "memory stick" at the last minute, totally proprietary, and useless in anything buy a sony product.
Eh...
So as an amateur photographer, can I do double exposures by slapping the side of the camera while it is writing to disk? On the serious side, I'm curious if any of y'all have looked into the digital backs for Nikon, Hasselblad, and Canon? These are larger in size, but for studio use are unbelievably superior to anything Sony has to offer... Just the fact that I can use my Zeiss lenses, and keep the interchangeability is almost worth the $15,000 for the Hasselblad back!
regards,
Benjamin Carlson
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
Every CDR system I have seen suffers from bounce, unless your machine is sat on concrete it's pretty inadvisable to jump around in the same room as a write in progress, and shaking the machine about is a definite no-go. So how would a CDR camera work? Unless this drive uses a CDRW or perhaps a load of flash for temporary storage which is written to the drive all in one go.
I assumed you wanted real DVD quality. If you just want ~VHS quality, then yeah, real-time with dedicated hardware isn't a problem. But it won't match a real DVD movie's quality.
Don't get me wrong, I love it to death, but here are a few critiques:
Now, it's a good product, but they have ignored some things that could make it a truly great product. First, scrap this business of having to hold it at arms length and look at the video screen. The screen is nice for previewing pictures, but I would rather look through a viewfinder.
Mount the viewfinder so that the camera would be turned 90 degrees towards you when shooting, with respect to the way it is held now. (my ascii art sucks, so I hope I am conveying this clearly). In that position, you would be holding the floppy unit "flat". I think that would be much more natural.
Also, as I look at the newer model Mavicas, I see that they have added a lot of features like sound, MPEG movie mode, etc. Big mistake!!! The whole point of having a Digicam is to take stills. If I wanted a camcorder, I would have bought one. All the effort they spend engineering those features is a big WASTE!!! If I were in charge of the Mavica design, I would strip any feature that didn't have to do with taking excellent still pictures, and plunge any savings into making the CCD larger. Pixelation is what keeps digicams from being a perfect replacement for film cameras. Eliminate visible pixelation, and you've got yourself a killer product.
Here's hoping Sony people read /.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That said, 156MB is pretty small. I've got a 128MB CF card in my TRGpro. There's a 400+ MB Microdrive-type product coming soon. Never mind, it is for people not interested in playing with cables.
That said, both SmartMedia cards and Sony's own Memory Stick can be used in a floppy-disk adapter, and that works up to 64MB. (and draws a lot less power, is smaller, etc).
Basically, it's a cool product, but it will need some luck to really get into the market...
Why isn't there more use of minidiscs or zip disks. In the case of minidiscs the technology has been long established is availabe and is pretty reliable.
I wonder how many people will get a coaster full of memories when the CD-R fails to burn or drains the last few amps from the batteries.
Digital Cameras are at the stage where they don't need marketing gimmicks (floppy disks, CD-R etc). What people need is something as usuable as a 35mm camera - you take your pictures, fill up a media storage unit, change it and take more.
This is what users need right now.
There's some interesting MD stuff at the MiniDisc MD Data Product Table page, including two MD still cameras (one Sony, one Sharp, both 640x480) and a MD Data2 Video camera - with heaps of links. Enjoy.
I wonder why we haven't also heard about video camcorders with build in DVD-RAM to record video in realtime to a DVD disc which you could replay on a standard DVD player and easily make high quality copies to send your friends and relatives?
Oh yeah, It's because the DVD recording format and in fact almost the entire industry is under the tightly held control of a few elite greedy corporations who aren't interested in what the consumers want. That's right isn't it, I forgot.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Well, having been a nerd for more years than a lot of slashdot readers have been alive, I have to disagree.
I do a lot of web design and I can tell you I wouldn't have many visitors to my sites if I sprinkled "multiple 6 MB images" throughout. The 640x480 resolution of my Mavica FD-71 is more than adequate for web images, and the amazing zoom is well worth the lesser resolution. The advantage of the floppy disk is certainly there, but it's not the only one.
My wife is not a nerd, but the floppy disk functionality means she can take a picture, then load it right into whichever Mac her student is using at the time. We don't have to worry about having cables for each computer, or loading software on each one, when their small hard drives are already overflowing. (Schools rarely have the latest and greatest, and while she spent about $3K on school supplies (not including computers), she doesn't get paid enough to be buying new computers for her classroom.)
So yes, when everyone has super-high-resolution monitors (more than 72dpi), and photo-printer output is not fiendishly expensive, high-resolution digital cameras will be more important. For now, however, unless you are a professional in the (print) design world, a good old Mavica should be just fine.
One last anecdote: Not long after we got the Mavica, my wife's grandmother had her 93rd birthday party. Naturally, we brought the camera. A little over a week later she passed away. We ran out and bought a new printer (cheapie Epson color inkjet -- <$200 at Price Club) and printed out one of the pictures we had taken. We put it in a frame and put it out at the funeral. Most people didn't realize that it wasn't a photograph until they got up close to it.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
That's just the point. Someone will provide high quality video/audio to the consumer. And when they do there will be those that break ranks with the rest of the "consortium" and they will try to profit from the new technology.
Some of these breakaway technologies will fail, but one of them will undoubtedly gain the critical mass necessary to force the content providers to switch to the new media or face destruction. Some of the industry elite will jump to late, and will become also rans. The people who were first movers on this new technology will fill their spots among the industry elite and will immediately throw all of their efforts into subverting any change to the status quo.
The high and mighty have opposed change throughout history, but it still has marched inexorably forward.
The fact that DVD players can't include firewire simply means that the DVD firewire combination is not going to be the combination that breaks open the digital media dam. Someone will have to come up with something else.
Don't worry though, they will. Just don't expect it to come from a source that has competing products in a much higher price range.