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12GB CompactFlash Cards Coming Soon
Anonymous Photographer writes "As Digital Photography Review reports, Pretec will release a 12 Gigabyte CompactFlash card by the end of the year... for just $14,900. Of course, you could save $14,300 by purchasing three Creative Labs Nomad MuVo 4 GB MP3 players and removing the Hitachi 4 GB microdrives to get the same amount of CompactFlash storage. Heck, I'll do the CF removal for you, at the low price of only $10,000. Think of the money you'll save." And for those seeking a different sort of windfall, VL writes "With MuVo 2 shells going on the cheap now, now is as good a time as any to pick one up and installing your own Compact Flash card to get it running again."
Except the ones in MP3 players are Compact Flash compatible hard drives, not flash drives.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Really, I know there are a few niche applications for that much space in compact flash, but where's the real market for these? Aren't most pros still using film, making the ammount of people willing to spend that much money on a CF card even smaller?
Banaaaana!
Has anyone tried running a Microdrive as an IDE drive with a CF-to-IDE adapter? I'm trying to install an OS on a 4GB Microdrive right now for an embedded application, and it's taking forever. The drive's transfer rate seems to slow down to the kilobytes-per-second range, depending on how long it's been powered up.
Do you need some special jumper or BIOS settings to use these devices as normal PC hard drives?
Now you can bring your entire porn collection with you with just one card!
And even if that doesn't happen, I'm sure the price will come down a LOT in the coming months, so even if the thing costs about a grand or two, a lot of pros will buy this if it saves them time while on a shoot.
And seriously, if you think this is expensive, I know a photographer who drives his junky van around to photo shoots with over $100,000 of professional equipment in the van, and that's only what he'll need on this shoot. In his shop, he probably has over a million dollars worth of photography equipment. This money doesn't grow on trees. It's what he's acquired throughout his professional career, by doing what he loves to do.
Funniest thing: I asked him where he got the money for all this. He said: If you want to have this much worth of equipment, not just in photography but in anything, all you have to do is focus only on that area and find every way possible to become as good at it as you can, and then to improve the field in every creative way you can imagine.
Thing is, even though microdrives are rugged (I have several and have never had a problem with them), they are still filled with moving parts.
A lot of pro photographers are in really tough assignment areas (i.e. war zones, etc.) with digital gear like Nikon or Canon's professional offerings... These cameras can run $4-8k easily and are ruggedized, waterproof, dustproof, etc. If you're going to be hopping through ditches and onto freight trucks and getting your gear submerged in mud and water every five minutes, there might be a distinct advantage to storage with no moving parts...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Considering relatively very slow write speed of current flash memories technology, 12G CF is simply not worth any price.
And yes, I use CF cards with PDA, notebook and desktop machine.
There you are, staring at me again.
thats amazing!!!!
There's a huge difference between Hitachi Microdrives and a quality CF card - speed! Professional Digital SLR cameras such as those made by Nikon and Canon are able to shoot very large frames at a pretty stiff frame rate. A professional photographer would quickly be frustrated at the time it takes to write such frames to a Microdrive, making them next to worthless.
As for the 12GB capacity, I can also see these being used in the recent crop of micro-size digital video cameras.
-JT
I have an old toshiba libretto that I'm running linux on. It is only capable of 64MB of ram, so obviously utilizes swap a bit, especially when running firefox.
I've noticed that CF cards tend to be slower than the hard drive, so using CF as swap doesn't seem like it would help.
Are there any memory type PCMCIA cards that can be used either as extra system memory or as swap space? The caveat, of course, is that it would have to be faster than the hard drive is with normal swap.
Of course, you could save $14,300 by purchasing three Creative Labs Nomad MuVo 4 GB MP3 players and removing the Hitachi 4 GB microdrives to get the same amount of CompactFlash storage.
Or of course you could also save $9,320 by buying three of their 4GB CF cards.
Obviously the 12GB card is not targetted at folks who don't mind swapping their CF cards.
What's amazing is how they are able to continuously increase the physical density at a rate that exceeds (= faster) than Moore's law. It will be interesting to see what happens to reliability figures.
Who needs photos bigger then 3-5 mega-pixles? Any bigger and they cant be displayed on a monitor at full res. no printer can match the resolution and the files are bloody HUGE. Transfering 1gig pictures from a memeory card at any speed would still take ages. Some times its nice to know the tech is out there, but it has no practicle use.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
your image collection of Jolene Blalock, Liv Tyler, and Natalie Portman.
Virtually all professional news photographers use digital cameras. Being able to use a laptop and a mobile phone to create and send instant contact sheets to show your editor which photos he has to pick from is far more convenient than heading for the nearest development lab.
I think you'll find that most pros (at least most of those who have to worry about things like deadlines) have embraced digital photography, and for reasons beyond picture quality. That's not to say that picture quality is an issue with the high-end cameras that these guys are using, only to reiterate that it's the convenience and flexibility that going digital affords them that are the overwhelming reasons why most pros have abandoned film cameras.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
...and go with this. That is, unless you just NEED a FlashDrive...
"Leisure is the mother of philosophy" - Thomas Hobbes
this could be useful in mini digital video recorders. away with those 30 second clips some cheap digital cameras offer. 16gb would be great and you could get some good resolution down. all the amateur porn you could make on one camera and being able to transfer it to a pc quickly without much user-interaction would be a good bonus.
its just a matter of dropping the price.
You are joking, right?
Any pro who hasn't gone digital by now is pretty much out of business and never will be in business again. Customers vastly prefer digital in most cases. Pros who claim they're faster/better with film are outright lying to save their own skins; digital offers instant previewing of composition, exposure, and focus (btw, don't buy a digital camera without a histogram mode in the review function!) Even in the studio, medium format and large format digital backs (one such company is Leaf, another is Capture1) are getting more and more common, with astounding image quality. Given how much MF/LF film costs, studio photographers LOVE digital backs.
When a 512MB card will hold 60+ 6+mp compressed RAW images (ie, straight from the CCD, no processing, far better than JPEG) and costs under $150, it pays for itself almost overnight...especially since you can't, with film, sit during a second or two's downtime and flip through what you've taken and blow away anything that's obviously not going to cut it. With film, you can't send the image across the world within minutes- with digital, it's pretty damn easy, as long as you have some internet connection (many photojournalist types have unlimited-transfer GSM phone accounts, just to be able to transfer images to the service bureau, although less time-sensitive stuff is done via fedex, either the CD-Rs or the memory cards themselves. Yes you can fedex film, but a)the photographer knows what's on it already, and b)within 10 seconds of it arriving via fedex you can be editing the images in photoshop- film, you've gotta wait at least an hour before you've got negatives).
This 12GB card isn't for photographers, I can virtually guarantee- they won't buy it, ignoring the absurd pricing. Many don't use anything larger than 1GB cards, for the simple reason that they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket- if a card fails, gets lost, stepped on, or accidentally erased, well...I'd rather have that be 1/4 of my shoot than ALL of my shoot.
Please help metamoderate.
While I doubt slashdot will effect Ebay's website, I bet the price will be $90.00 by Monday.
Good time to sell them if you got them.
hmmm.
1) Buy MP3 player.
2) ???? (strip for parts and sell on ebay)
3) Profit?
Considering the space program essentially used flash memory to store just about everything on the Mars missions, I imagine they're a prime candidate. They'd have to wait for cards that are radiation and durability tested, which may take years.
Hard drives are a liability in space: one more gizmo that can fall apart from vibration, not to mention dust. Flash memory is far more reliable.
Good Write up, But as you mentioned that user can buy 3 Nomad Muvo by spending $600 (Or less). I noticed prices for $256 CF are around $20 (Posted today on http://www.dealsofamerica.com). Remember these CompactFlash Cards used to be around $100 just couple of years ago. I bought mine for $68 or so last year. So its good to have 12 GB CF, but as of now I dont see big utility. Pocket size MP3 players with 20GB Storage for $200 have virtually diminished the need for a common man to spend so much on this. I am not sure where it will be used (What I am sure if someone will use it thats why they are releasing it)..but its not for me..
Much better idea: plug this into the iPod you already have. You get between 15 and 40 GB of storage for $110.
I write in my journal
I just got a Nikon D70. 12 Gigs, would do me for about 3,500+ pictures at max quality.
Thats crazy number of pictures, hell, I have harddrives that are smaller than that CF card.
snowulf.com
Well, I dont see much profit people will make out of taking out part of MP3 player that can be used as CFII or for camera's... If you see at ebay, prices for Hitachi CFII (As they call it) is hovering around $130 or so. And MP3 player without storage is selling for $57 or so at amazon.com by individual users. I dont see much gain people will make out of it. The only advantage is that if you use it for yourself, You are getting 4 GB Storage for $200 and you are getting MP3 player for free - that you can run with 512 MB CF (sandisk works fine).
Everybody thinks this is a waste of space. But just you wait until those Holo cameras the doc used on Voyager go on sale. Then we will see who thinks 12GB is too much. Same thing went for my 10GB Hard Drive I got several years ago....never thought I would need more space.
The technology comes first, they we wait for it's applications. Same thing goes for that smelling device in an article earlier which seems pretty useless to most now.
Oh really? :-)
I use a Canon 1D for sports photography (4Mb files @ 8fps in 16 shot bursts) so I require fast write times, and I use microdrives.
Microdrive write times are fractionally slower than solid state storage but they are also half the price.
Microdrives being more fragile than solid state cards is a much bigger issue than the write times. Some pros won't touch microdrives because of the perceived vulnerability to shock damage but for most practical purposes the write times aren't an issue.
Also you should consider that some cameras don't write to storage at the fastest possible speeds. For example, my 1D can write 16*4Mb files in the same time that the new 1D Mk II can write 20*8Mb files to a card of the same speed. All this talk of write speeds is somewhat irrelevant when you realise that even some of the high-end cameras don't write at the maximum speed.
But tomrrow it will be cheaper, and drive down the costs of smaller CF card..
This is a good thing for all, even those that dont have the cash for a 12gb card...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's true that as long as you are keeping shots within the buffer space of the camera (can be up to 40 shots or more), you're OK. Once you overflow that buffer though, you're subjected to the speed difference between solid-state and the Microdrive. There's also about a 4-second spin-up time for the Microdrive - that's a real pain in the ass when you want a quick look at the shots you just took.
Also, one also shouldn't overlook some of the other potential drawbacks of Microdrives - such as incompatibility and heat generation. There are reports of earlier Microdrives creating so much heat that they melted the plastic in Nikon D1s. Granted, this isn't nearly as much of a problem in more recent revisions, but it's still a concern to some.
Microdrives have also had compatibility problems with some Pro and Pro-sumer equipment. Nikon wouldn't recommend their use in the D1H for a long time due to some goofy problem that would cause the camera to hang.
-JT
What's wrong with 6*2GB @$148ea = 12GB @$900?
--
make install -not war
ever wonder why pro photographers want "Sandisk highspeed" yeah it is becasue they want to be able to snap photos like crazy and not have to wait for the photo to be saved.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I wonder which Creative marketing mor^H^H^Hgenius thought up this response? And how long before we see these?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...sales guy at crcuit city way back in 1992 while my dad was buying me a computer for junior high school:
"Will we ever run out of drive space?" my dad asked him.
"Nah. No one will ever use an entire 170mb hard drive." quoth the sales guy.
I specifically remerber overhearing that conversation while playing with MS Paint on Windows 3.1 on a display machine and now whenever some one says the same thing about the latest technology...
I just chuckle.
So if I'm saving money buy it for the HD rather then just buying the HD alone. Then wouldn't selling the empty husk be profit?
So instead of buying the mp3 player and removing the 4GB microdrive..why not just buy a 4GB microdrive? How much do they cost?
Why 12 gigs? Thats not for pro's!
This is about as far from true as possible, everyone is thinking of sports events and such like that. What about the pro photographers that arent in such accessable areas. Nature Photography anyone? How about some animals? Longer trips into the wilderness?
Now I am not agreeing that 12 gigs is needed for most anyone, but for thoes that go out on longer trips, out of cell ranger or where laptops are too heavy to cary with (backpacking, canoeing?), this is perfect. Its small, and will take alot of pictures.
And as a complete amature photographer myself, I wouldnt mind having 12 gigs (not that I take that many photos, but... its handy) so I dont have to rely on having my laptop around for longer shoots or trips of my own.
snowulf.com
"Of course, you could save $14,300 by purchasing three Creative Labs Nomad MuVo 4 GB MP3 players and removing the Hitachi 4 GB microdrives to get the same amount of CompactFlash storage."
Not any more. The did something to CF HDDs in there newer players. While they are removeable they are unusable in any other divice. I'm not sure why they woun't work, but they woun't. Also you can't replace the CF HDD in newer modles with another CF card.
I've had it up to here ^ with the muvo2 hacking scene. I can understand people wanting to get 4gb drives for their cameras, but there are some of us who would like to find *intact* muvo2s for sale to (gasp) listen to music on. Most places are usually out of stock because so many people are tearing these apart to put the drives up on ebay. I've seen people on forums trying to sell fifty drive-less muvo2's. Ugh. Guess I'll have to buy an ipod mini.
Image vaults are now available today for about $300. They contain a harddrive (often on the order of 30 gigs) and a cardreader. They're about the size of an mp3 player. Just plug your card in and dump the images. Some of them can even burn a CD.
here are several reviews of many varieties
-
It seems only a few years ago I was using Psion Organisers with 16 kilobyte memory packs.
OK, so it was nearly 20 years ago.
In 20 years time, if technology continues at the same pace, what will we be doing with petabyte drives?
It may be $14,000 now but in four years you'll be able to get it on ebay for $5
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Finally Progress. Eventually I would like to see a 40 or 80GB compact flash drive (with similar or better performance to a SATA drive) replace standard hard drives. Standard hard drives may be larger, but they still fail more frequently than flash cards. If the performance were the same I would sacrifice size for reliability any day.
...as CF devices - they are ATA only disks as of this point folks.
Not a rumor...I received two of the new-spec units on Friday.
For those that didn't get one of the "tube-packed" models, you are S-O-L (that would include me, unfortunately).
New-style packaging, with a close up of the Creative disclaimer on the back:
http://www.digitalfields.com/movo2-cases.jpg
http://www.digitalfields.com/muvo2-close.jpg
I think they would be happy to be selling the devices, who cares what they are used for! It's not like Creative has a music store they are making the real money on.
Furthermore, what they have done is asked for a flood of returns. For a while people will order the sight-unseen, then when they receive the device if they are lucky they'll return it right away, or if they are unlucky or just hasty (I can see myself here) they would open the device, find it does not work, put the cad back and returned the openend device - even at a bit of a loss for restocking.
So at best they are going to see a good bit of false sales, at worst they end up with a lot of used goods on thier hands that they can no longer sell as new, all of which have been opened!
I still don't really understand why either Creative or Apple would care, as I said in teh first place - I guess Apple just didn't want to see too many mini iPod fishtank mods around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why hasn't slashdot reported on it? Oh wait... they did.
Why not? The price is surely going to come down in a year or two, and the low power consumption and speed would be great.
"4.8 MB KB/sec"
should be
"4.8 MB/sec"
Oops.
Watch on these, I see from some other posts that the new units don't even have the CF drives in them...
However, that's not what I was going to mention...
Look at this image from one of the linked articles...
The Hitachi drives are CF Type II, not Type I...Most consumer and even some "prosumer" digital cameras only take CF Type I cards. This is also the big difference between the 12GB CF card and the 4GB drives...
The article isn't really clear, but from the picture in the article, it looks like it will be a CF Type I device....
size...
Even a ten mp camera's picture isn't amazing if you really want to blow it up. An analogue camera's film stores MUCH more in terms of actual details. Digital camera's have come a LONG way and you can make some pretty big pictures (small-medium poster size with 10mp--which is just about the max) but if your making anything that is about the size of a large poster or bigger you have no choice but analogue.
The only pro's that can effectively use digital are those that deal with newspaper or full magazine page pics. Even in that case it can be an issue if you want to concentrate the image on a just a segment of your photo and blow that up.
Hmmm... Pie...
this could be useful for ditigal camrecorders
Click for offensive t-sh
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
"When new drives come out people say "who needs that?" but then later on it becomes "I need more!""
The same was said about sex. Now look were we are.
15 years from now, you'll be finding these drives
in various conditions for a couple dollars at
your local thrift shop. This reminds me of when
10meg drives cost serveral thousand dollars a pop.
left and right (and not from being dropped either).
Do you need instructions how to upgrade or repair your portable digital audio player? You may find solutions to take apart the Apple iPod, the Creative Nomad MuVo, the Archos JukeBox and other digital music players.
Sometimes I really wonder about the price of new technology.
Does it really need to be so expensive to make a profit or are they relying on the fact people are accustomed to things costing so much?
I don't expect an answer, but I really wonder sometimes.
"There's also about a 4-second spin-up time for the Microdrive - that's a real pain in the ass when you want a quick look at the shots you just took."
I've never experienced that. I press the review button on my camera, the picture comes up on the screen. It has always seemed instantaneous to me, certainly not 4 seconds, not even 1 second.
In a few years, once they've sold enough of them to cover their R&D expense and are able to sell them at a much lower price. An hour of DV footage is 9GB. A typical mini-DV tape stores an hour. One of these would fit over an hour of footage while still being smaller and taking less power than a tape. In addition, it would be random access, so I would be able to delete takes that were no good easily to reclaim free space. The biggest advantage would be copying the footage to my G7 (the computer I will probably have by the time these are cheap enough for mere mortals to afford), since I would be able to select the clips I want and copy them, or scrub through the footage easily before copying - something tape is not very good at.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Creative updated their Hitachi drive, so now if you remove the drive and try to use it in your camera - it will not work
Funny. I did an 18x20 print (pro lab, not inkjet) for a friend of a cropped photo off a 6.3mp Canon 10D.
It's gorgeous, and you're talking out of your ass, my friend.
Please help metamoderate.
Where is my $2 2 gig HD I ask? My poor Granny is suffering without a computer cuz they don't come cheaper than $50.
I know it's not really a matter of complexity but it really feels like someone is screwing the pooch on this one.
IBM has been a driving force in storage technology for as long as I can remember (even when they weren't making their own drives they were doing research which led to improvements) but their latest releases have also been flaky for about as long as I can remember. Most recently I had a whole batch of DFHS S2Ws (2.25GB UW scsi, those drives are like a plague upon the land, you can find them everywhere) and out of 13 of them that I have owned, all but 2 went bad. These drives were THE hot shit at IBM except for the 4GB version... Which I've never seen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
illustrated guide to removal
anyone tried these cards with the canon powershot s100-s500 series???
I understand they have to make a profit but......who will buy that card for 14g's - Directors who just want to look cool and stupid at the same time?
Anyone know how long these last? I'd love to get one, but don't want to spend $200 on a dud.
sig.
On the Nikons, this difference between CF and Microdrive is readily apparent.
So send them back.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I would like to take this time to remind everyone to grab an ink pen and write "REWARD!!!" and your phone number on the label of your CF cards. I lost a card full of NYC pics less than 48 hours after laughing about the label on the card. "Who would label a memory card?"
The truth doesn't care what I think.
I just might do that.
They're about the size of an mp3 player
One such device is an mp3 player, and mp3 recorder as well:
Archos gmini 220
640k is enough for everyone.
Finally! Some new cameras worth looking at upgrading to! (I think you'll all agree its about time I replaced my old 2MP Sony Cybershot)...
Any recommendations? I'm looking at Sony, Canon, or Nikon (pretty much... those are my 'preferred' brands...)
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Wouldn't it be ironic if these pictures were taken with a camera, storing the images on one of those drives that "dont work".
...and then, come to think of it, I wasn't able to format the card afterward, either. Grr.
Its probably the similar technology that was used by certain MP3 players to format SmartMedia cards which couldn't be read by SmartMedia readers (PCMCIA adapters or digital cameras)
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)