Slashdot Mirror
Rio Carbon MP3 Has A 5G CF To Be Cannibalized
GlucoPilot writes "This guy bought a Rio Carbon Mp3 player because he figured he could rip the 5GB CF Card out of it. He did, and put it in his prosumer 6MP digital camera. Now he can take 1,500 six-megapixel pics in one sitting. Oy." The card is apparently a 5GB Microdrive, note, not 5GB of Flash memory.
They've always been nice to us, supporting open standards like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
I'm surprised we haven't seen those microdrives in camcorders yet. I wonder why?
Why? DV tape is so much cheaper, with much bigger capacity.
While a microdrive may be faster, with random access, DV tapes are fast enough for almost all camcorder applications, and far more robust than a microdrive.
If you search completed items on eBay, a 5GB microdrive went for $96 recently. So this guy wasted $150. The days of buying MP3 players and selling them for their parts are over.
But I don't get it. Why would they want to redesign it? Won't they sell more the way it is now, since both the people that want to play music and the people who want the hard drive are buying?
Also, there's the other side of it: what if somebody wanted the shell? The thing that upsets me about the iPod Mini is that I want an iPod (to sync with my iBook), but I want a flash-based player. I would have loved to buy an iPod Mini shell off Ebay after somebody else took the hard drive, but NOOOO, Apple had to go screw it up!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ok.. maybe I'm missing something here.. Are these things sold with a mandatory music-download-service subscription or something like that, in order to subsidize the price of the hardware? Or what?
Because if they make their money off selling the things.. that doesn't make sense. Why should they care what you do with their product once they've sold it? This could leads to them selling more units.
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
Why else would they always put the link in the most useless part of the text? To keep me on my toes? The link does not point to 1,500 six-megapixel pics, so the link text should not be "1,500 six-megapixel pics." The link text should be the "rip the 5GB CF Card out of it."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You think he might have put some larger images on the site so that people could follow along with his mod...
What kind of camera can take 1,500 6 mega pixel pictures without a change of batteries? If you can change batteries, you can change media as well.
I've got a Sony DSC-V1, and I love it. But getting a > 256mb memory stick won't do me too much good without extra batteries.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apple ipod drives are 'dumber' than your normal 1" microdrive or 1.6" mini-drive. They lack a lot of the logic IC's and firmware that allows them to be used with standard IDE interfaces. Instead, the ipod controlls the drive electronics directly. This essentially does a few things: 1) it makes the drives cheaper for apple, 2) it makes refurbishing/upgrading/recycling/repairing faulty iPods a lot cheaper since you dont have to replace the drive's control electronics when you replace the drive, and 3) it makes the drives unusable in anything other than an ipod.
While reason #3 is often cited by conspiracy theorists to be some kind of plot to prevent people from canibalizing drives out of the ipod to prevent potential loss of iTunes revenue, it is really only a side effect of reasona #1 and #2. If running full-fledged drives in the iPod were actually cheaper or the same price as running drives with reduced integrated electronics, rest assured Apple would do it. It's got to be a fairly difficult/expensive/unnecessary engineering process to integrate drive electronics into your design simply to keep people from buying your product to take it apart.
Sure, they could have internal storage, but you pay for the camera without that, so why should they increase their costs? Sure, they could have a better battery, but then you would buy the $70 secondary battery. Sure, they could improve the optical zoom, but it's cheaper for them to add digital zoom and fool most consumers with it.
They're trying to make money, not help you.
But... aren't CF memory cards anywhere from 3 to 5 times slower?
In a word, No
High end CF memory cards are 2 to 3 times faster than microdrives.
Of course they can cost up to fourteen thousand dollars for the really big ones