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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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
That's just another way of saying that the technology isn't there yet. I hope the resolution of even the small screens of portable devices will have improved quite a bit before printers improve much more. I wish printers would go the way of the dodo, personally. It's not that I hate paper, it's just that I tend to accumulate far too much of it.
Who would ever need a view camera? Who would ever like to shoot photos that can be printed at mural size?
Answer: Lots of folks. Not a ton mind you, but enough that the demand has already been proven on the film-technology side of the aisle.
Not everyone is a sorority girl shooting party pics to be emailed or printed out at 3x5...
-JT
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.
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.
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
On a side note, just think that Fox News bought a Hummer (a 1st generation one) to take into Iraq when they drove in there with the U.S. military. When the time came to ditch the equipment, they left that vehicle right there in the desert, and didn't give it a second thought. When you're in business, you have to make decisions, and those decisions can get quite expensive sometimes, but if the return on those decisions is several times that price, then it's a no-brainer.
Sure, someone would easily pay the nearly $15,000 because this equipment solves some problem.
"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.
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?
If I'm not mistaken, it's the C5P core. This 3D acceleration that you speak of is in the chipset, and it's ordinary S3 ProSavage crap that you find in bottom-of-the-line P4 boards with VIA chipsets. However, the encryption stuff is awesome. It means this is one of the fastest CPUs to encrypt - it beats 3.4GHz P4s by miles.
you only have to swap batteries if you leave the backlit display on like a noob, turn it off and use the viewfinder, you will get a HUGE improvement in battery life (appx 180 photos on one set of batteries for me) when the preview display is on the camera has to run the display and the focus motors *Constantly* rather than for a few moments for each picture
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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...
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0111/biggart_int ro.htm
Bill Biggart and Bill Biggart's Microdrive had the World Trade Center fall on them. The Microdrive was recoverable. Bill wasn't. This little story allayed any fears I had about Microdrives.
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.
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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.