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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!
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
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
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.
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.
Transfering 1gig pictures from a memeory card at any speed would still take ages.
It most certainly would. I took an uncompressed picture with a friend's 5 megapixel cameral. The resulting picture took a full 30 seconds(!) just to put onto the card inside the camera. And it was only 14 megabytes. I think the "Flinstones" camera with the bird inside chiseling out the picture was faster.
What?
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.
"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.
...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