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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.
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.
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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.