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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."
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.
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
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.
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?
"So the guy skipped a step... you take the CF compatible drive and install it into a CF card. Not a big deal."
No, actually the difference is larger than that. The single 12 GB card is flash media; it's a solid state device. The three 4 GB microdrives are very small hard drives. There's the difference. The flash media would probably be more reliable as there are no moving parts to wear out/break, should read and write at a higher speed, and should consume less power.
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
...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