Slashdot Mirror
4Gb CF Card Announced
An anonymous reader writes "Lexar has today announced that it now shipping a 4 GB 40x Compact Flash card. The card's claim to fame is the ability to store 600 RAW images taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera. This card also features Lexar's WA (Write Acceleration) technology which can improve performance further with WA enabled cameras. Because this card is larger than 2 GB, you will need a camera which is FAT32 compliant. This card is available now at the heady price of $1,499 ($0.37/MB). It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive."
is still the time it takes for a camera to transfer from on-memory to the card... no matter how big the card is, until this time is reduced, it'll still be hard for some applications ..
But it's definitely good.. I use a CF-Reader on my laptop instead of a diskdrive, and obviously, a 4 GB CF card would definitely be nice.. now I can easily transfer data between machines!
Of course, again, though, bandwidth is still an issue..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
How long until solid state technology replaces hard drives outright, or at least supplements them?
And, only slightly offtopic, why must PCs have pagefiles created on a hard drive? Why not have a bunch of SDRAM slots, even on a PCI card, and have 4 gigs of uber-cheap PC133, then create a 4 gig swap file in RAM (if not natively supported).
I hate having to swap to HDD, and my only option being super-pricey DDR or RDRAM upgrades.
A machine would do just fine with 256 Megs of Dual-DDR400, and 4 gigs or so of PC133. Then HDD as an absolute last resort. It plugs right in to the tiered-memory architecture, so why would this not work?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
IBM has been producing Compact Flash Type 2 form-factor micro drives for some time now.
Here's one:
Clicky!
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
a quick google search reveals that a 1 GB version is about 170... 170 * 4 = 680. At 1500 bucks, I think I'd rather just keep three other 1 gb sticks in my pocket/camera bag/whatever... granted, if you're a professional photgrapher you might think otherwise, but I recall something that we used a few years back that had to be changed every X number of pictures, what was it, oh yes... film.
I'd say it has to be easier to pop a flash card in and out of a digital camera as opposed to a roll of film... but thats just me.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
unrelated note... I wish all PCs would come with CF slots on them standard. i think its the best alternative to the floppy. ive even started carrying arround a card reader so i can use CF to replace my stacks of zip disks.
I want 2D games back.
As far as I can tell, this thing is only useful for professional photographers. When getting my picture taken for the cover of Pro. PHP4 MM Programming, I saw that the photographer had several 1GB CF cards strewn over his desk. Digital photos are becoming more popular because people can get them reprinted and such. There's not really a loss in quality either, since the photos are 5-7 megapixels. But you end up getting 27MB TIFF files (in B/W)! I'm sure there are other uses for this sort of storage, but this is the best example I could think of.
I think that the price to pay for CF is way too heavy for this card to fit into general use. CF cards don't have the longest lifespan in the world either. Until these prices go down, I don't think CF will become a really hot item. I mean, look at iPods. 20GB of storage at less than half the price (and it'll play your MP3s).
The other disappointment regarding the price is that it's too high to push the prices down on 1GB models, so we won't see these being shoved into consumer electronics anytime soon either.
I think that by the time CF gets to be reasonably priced, other devices of similar size and much higher capacity will be available. I don't have a good feeling about the lifespan of CF.
On the other hand, I'd like to know some of the uses that this card may see. I may be completely oblivious to its practical usage. Feel free to enlighten me as to where this could be used, what it will replace, and whether or not the price is right for that application.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
Think about it... 6 Divx movies in the palm of your hand...
Now to create a card reader/decoder for my DVD player...
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
What's the MTBF on these things? I've had CF cards go bad on me before, and it's always a bummer when you lose photos. I personally think it's best to go with several mid-sized cards rather than one gargantuan one. That way, if a single card goes bad, you don't lose everything. Even for pro-tographers who take zillions of pictures, it's a good idea. Changing a CF card takes less time than changing a roll of film, so it won't interrupt the workflow all that much. Plus it might save you a major headache should you lose everything.
On the same lines, I think someone should come out with a redundant flash card. Instead of a single 4GB card, perhaps two 2GB cards in one, with the storage mirrored as in a RAID. I know some people might pay extra for the added security/redundancy.
Very wrong, at least for Canon cameras, Canon's raw format captures the data as it is coming off the image censor. By saving this information post processing can be done on the raw data rather than the interpretation of the processing chip and the JPEG engine. For instance I have seen images had contrast improved without upsetting the shadow details which just isn't possible with normal post processing on a regular image, if you've ever see it you will know how superior to dumb Photoshop filters it is.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
My primary drive is 8 GB. Windows uses only half of it (other half is BSD). Yes, I have another drive in there too. Obviously, I don't store a lot of music and video. The point is, it's looking more and more realistic for at least some users like myself to have totally solid-state PCs. Quiet PC nirvanna; just around the corner.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Larger compact flash cards are now big enough to act as replacements for hard-drives for small/special purpose PCs. For example, my firewall, even with all of it's logging only needs about 200M of storage.
I could use a CF card to build a small/slow PC with no moving parts (fanless also). That seems like it would be a lot more reliable.
However, how well do Compact Flash cards deal with continuous writing and rewriting? How long could a card handle the data being logging to disk from my firewall before it starting having errors?
How much of a problem would the slower write times be? In the case of the firewall, I would expect there to be enough ram to keep the slow CF read/write times from being a problem, but how much difference is there overall?
plus-good, double-plus-good