Slashdot Mirror
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."
Not yet. But for that comment I didn't need to, as I was talking about the blurb which I did read, not the article.
1. The new 12GB CF card costs $14,000. Because of the high price, it must be a flash drive.
2. The MP3 player the submitter talks about uses a CompactFlash compatible hard drive. I know this becuase I distinctly remember it from a past article on the iPod mini.
3. The submitter talks smugly about something which is false. So I corrected it.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Check out this interesting article on Sports Illustrated digital workflow to see how the pros do it and how much data was generated ... with the last generation of digicams!
Having said all that, that is one heck of a price-premium for this 12 GByte card, so I'd take it as just a bleading edge product, but you'll continue to see larger/faster (BTW, faster is REALLY important to the pro's because you want to be able to drain the digicam memory buffer) cards coming down the pipe for cheaper ... and they will be used! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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..
a bit hard to get... the grandparent poster was saying that taking those three 4gb drives would not be the same as the 12gb card, because the 12gb card is a cf card, not a cf compatible drive... slight difference, but still there.
i think it's a bigger deal that you need three to do the same thing, but w/e
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
It'll be a long time before there's a 100x increase in file sizes in digital cameras. Kodak's 14MP cameras produce RAW images that are closer to 10MB each.
Clearly this product is meant for photographers who don't pay for their own equipment.
"Who needs photos bigger then 3-5 mega-pixles?"
Me please.
"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."
Which is why you resample down and sharpen (or unsharp for printing). The current standard resolutions for pro work are 4Mpx, 8Mpx and 11Mpx. It is expected that we'll reach 14Mpx and then 22Mpx within the year. These file sizes are necessary for large, high quality magazine prints, billboards, posters, etc. Obviously they aren't intended for the consumer market.
"Transfering 1gig pictures from a memeory card at any speed would still take ages."
I just transferred 2*1Gb cards via a firewire card reader and it took maybe five minutes. I wouldn't mind waiting twice as long for files with twice the resolution.
"Some times its nice to know the tech is out there, but it has no practicle use."
For you, quite possibly it doesn't.
But for me, and for many other people, it has a lot of use.
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
Don't bother unless you really need it for some sort of specialized application. I used to run Windows on a 1GB Microdrive on a SBC with a CF slot as IDE0. It was slow and failed pretty quickly. Microdrives really can't handle it. I honestly don't know about the newer 4GB ones, but I highly doubt that it'll last very long if you install an OS on it, especially if you have swap space on it.
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
-
Bull
The average file for a bill board prints from 7-21 DPI, low resolution yes, but for an average 30 or 40 sheet billboard (think from 25-35ish feet wide) you will build your file for that at 1/2inch=1', or posibly even 1-1. So the general rule of thumb is at 1" to 1' you build at 300 dpi. So you are talking about a file that is 36" wide at 300 dpi or 10,800 pixels wide, or around 125-150 megabyte file.
However, to make matters worse, they are now using much higher resolution ink jets to print many billboars, as they are starting to put billboards at viewing distance of as little as 3' (think airport walkways & subway stations). So while not wuite as large, you still need about 100 dpi for a 20' billboard, or about 24,000 and a file size of about 750 mb.
There have been occasions where we have used digital photography for outdoor work, but it is either a case where we are comping together a photograph from multiple 11mp shots or blowing it up and it looks kinda soft.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
...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
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....
To be more exact, NAND flash (used in most mass storage devices) can take around 100,000 rewrites. NOR flash (used in embedded systems needing true random access to memory) can take about 1,000,000. (I think I got that the right way around). Assuming one rewrite to a memory block per minute (we are being VERY generous here). How many weeks will your card work for?
;-).
;-)
Flash cards usually use wear leveling to prolong their lives under heavy rewrite conditions, but even this can't keep up with a lot of page swapping.
Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) is a new technology just avaliable at very low capacities (Motorola has 4Mbit - 512kbyte - chips out now) which claims virtually infinite re-write capability (and much better r/w speed, too. If they start making these at higher densities into CF/PCMCIA/card-format-of-the-week, you can probably make it work. I am, in fact, hoping to use this technology at the next generation (16Mbit) for a very similar purpose in a consumer device (which I am designing as a personal project -- hence I have the luxury of waiting around for technology to catch up with my needs!
If you want a hardware project, get yourself a depopulated (ie, no chips) PCMCIA SRAM card designed to hold 4Mbit SRAMS of the same JEDEC pinout and solder on a bunch of MRAMS. They are electricaly compatible with SRAMS. You will need a very fine soldering iron, a very steady hand and a jewlwer's eyepiece for best soldering results. You would max out at 16MBytes, it think, which is the largest size PCMCIA SRAM can handle (limit on addressing pins). Beyond that capacity you are mucking around with simulating ATA devices, something I refuse to do. No waranty offered by the poster on this procedure
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
See the following site
Cannon beats 35mm
It puts 10 MP (specifically a cannon, which may be important, as lense and CCD design do have profound effects on the digital camera) as being the superior to 35mm film in every possible catagory, hence a 20 MP camera like this one fujifilm camera> would outperform a 70mm film in every possible catagory
With the added benifits of digital (being able to review the pictures, delete unnessassary photoes, send photos without the need to scan over the internet, one step adding photoes to photo editing software, cheaper cost of prints, no development costs; no one who has enough money to buy a good digital camera should be using a non-digital; The only remanining reasons are cost (because you allready own 70mm photo equipment, which is not cheap to replace), inability, and lazyness; But the cost issue is mostly a misnomer- Even though a 20MP digital costs a lot; the savings from not having to make extera prints to make sure that the client likes it, or having to piss off clients with prints they don't like and the development costs on those prints (assuming you do photography professionally, but why else would you have a 20mp camera or 70mm film camera?) will pay for itself soon enough.
The only people who should not have digital cameras RIGHT NOW, are, ironically, home users- who can get a good 35mm for $200, but would need to pay $700 for a good ~10MP digital camera, the difference of $500 would pay for a LOT of photo development!
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post