12GB CompactFlash Cards Coming Soon 254
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."
Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not any more )-: (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder which Creative marketing mor^H^H^Hgenius thought up this response? And how long before we see these?
Was wondering the same thing... (Score:2)
Furthermore, what they have done is asked for a flood of returns. For a while people will order the sight-unseen, then when they receive the device if they are lucky they'll return it right away, or if they are unlucky or just hasty (I can see myself here) they would open the device, find it does not work, put the cad back and returned the ope
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Ummm (Score:2, Informative)
i think it's a bigger deal that you need three to do the same thing, but w/e
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
So the guy skipped a step... you take the CF compatible drive and install it into a CF card. Not a big deal. That's the kind of literal-geek-talk that annoys people. Here's an example:
Jim: My 302 is faster than your 351!
Ned: No it's not! Your 302 isn't in a car!
Blah blah blah
As for the 3 cards versus 1 card? I suppose, somewhere, somebody wants to snap a single picture that is larger than 4GB. Lucky he can spend $15,000 to get that one picture.
Even if the pictures he's recording are 1 byte over 4GB, that 12GB card would only afford him the ability to capture 2 at a time. That is awesome. I wonder if any CF-compatible camera even exists where this is a concern.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
Who's gonna buy em? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2, Insightful)
Here I'm going to try to set up a router with no moving parts at all. VIA motherboard with no CPU or power supply fans, no floppies, no CD drives (after install). Just a 512MB flash card in a CF-IDE adapter, with a small Debian install on it.
That should be the first computer I have to be completely silent.
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2)
English needs parentheses. Upon reading this, my first thought was "maybe it will be completely silent, but it won't be doing much without a CPU."
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2, Insightful)
Truth be told, however, I probably would have stated it exactly as you did. I was just kidding; ambiguity is a fact of life in all languages, and your intent was clear enough once I considered the context.
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2)
I'd have said it similarly.
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2)
I've had silent computers for YEARS.
VIC=20
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
Mac Plus
Palm IIIx
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:2)
Commodore: Floppy drive"
I see your 1541/71/81 Commodore drive (and Dobbs knows, the 1541 could raise a racket when the R/W head was trying to find Track Zero!) and raise you the Commodore 1750 RAM Expansion Unit!
One whole whopping HUGE megabyte of RAM disk. Once all the needed software was installed, you didn't need a floppy drive. Unless you shut
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind though, a few years ago 40gb of computer storage space seemed like too much. Storage has always had that. When new drives come out people say "who needs that?" but then later on it becomes "I need more!"
Re:Who's gonna buy em? (Score:5, Informative)
Check out this interesting article on Sports Illustrated digital workflow [robgalbraith.com] 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! ;-)
Quite the opposite, really... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
pros and digital (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:pros and digital (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pros and digital (Score:2)
You are saying the demand is there...
Re:pros and digital (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:pros and digital (Score:2)
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!)
I think you're overstating the value of digital. The photographer needs to work with whatever he's most comfortable with. On most jobs, prints or transparencies need to be delivered anyway because its so difficult to
Re:pros and digital (Score:2)
I wonder how long that will be true. Some service bureaus have already gone all-digital, and "camera ready" has really become "scanner ready".
Re:pros and digital (Score:2)
you've obviously never dealt with color management. many top photographers don't even understand it. (thats where i come in)
Limits of digital... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 mag
Re:Limits of digital... (Score:4, Informative)
Cannon beats 35mm [normankoren.com]
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 [dpreview.com]> 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!
obviously no real world experience (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Space program (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
good theory (Score:2)
Me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Price will come down. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Price will come down. (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly this product is meant for photographers who don't pay for their own equipment.
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
Some cameras only do compressed TIFF for raw which isn't as good at the 12-bit internal format that most pro cameras use.
Re:Price will come down. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, if you like gadgets, there's a world of stuff out there for you. It's all too easy to turn the art of photography into a geek's paradise of analysis, formulas, and techniques. But I guess that kind of flexibility is just the beauty of the medium.
Re:Price will come down. (Score:4, Interesting)
$4000 seems a little low in some respects, especially if you want to be digital. However, the guy that replied to you stating that a single lens would be $4000 is a little off base. You don't have to have the fastest, most low dispersion lenses to start with. It all depends on the kind of photography you want to do. I have friends that shoot professionally, and believe it or not they sometimes use plastic toy cameras. Of course, this is the exception, but it does show that creative endeavors (commercial ones at that) don't have to cost a fortune. And, you can have all the gear in the catalog and stil be a crappy shooter.
Tech is an answer to a technical problem, not a creative one.
From what I've seen photographers can be (mostly) divided into those who love the gadgets and know how to compute the hyperfocal distance and those who have an idea of what kind of image they want to create. By far, those in the latter category produce the most interesting stuff.
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
Like I replied in the other thread, I'm speaking from the experience of living with a very successful wedding and portrait photographer for the last three years. Her current workflow involves a D100 ($1500), an SB800 flash ($800), a few 1GB CF cards ($750), two lenses worth about $300, and a $70 reflector. Granted, the lenses only go to F/4, but it isn't that hard to pull off a good number of shots with that. And upgrading to a ~28-300mm lens with F/2.4
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
Re:Price will come down. (Score:2)
19 megapixels is only 57 MB (assuming 8 bits per channel). You'd need ~323 megapixels per photo to fill a gig. Large numbers of photos seems like more likely use than copiously large photos somehow.
Microdrive vs. flash (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Microdrive vs. flash (Score:2)
Re:Microdrive vs. flash (Score:3, Interesting)
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,
Re:Microdrive vs. flash (Score:2)
Re:Microdrive vs. flash (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Speed factor? (Score:2, Interesting)
And yes, I use CF cards with PDA, notebook and desktop machine.
Re:Speed factor? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a simple equation:
value = capacity + speed + reliability
Compared to mechanical storage (oh shit, head crash! there goes my latest $10,000 shoot), high-capacity CF is worth what, to non-pros, looks to be ridiculously high prices. CF might not be as fast as a 15,000-RPM SCSI drive, but Lexar's 2-gig CF cards write at 4.8 MB KB/sec. That ain't too damn bad when you can store two gigs of data on your roll. (Lexar sells larger sizes, but that's the one tha
Re:Speed factor? (Score:2)
How often do heads crash? If it is rare, it would probably still be cheaper to use disk, and if you do have a crash on your $10k shoot, send the disk to a data recovery service. Sure, those are expensive, but I think even they are cheap compared to this huge flash drive.
Hitachi drives not a viable option for pro photo (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the 12GB capacity, I can also see these being used in the recent crop of micro-size digital video cameras.
-JT
Re:Hitachi drives not a viable option for pro phot (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hitachi drives not a viable option for pro phot (Score:2)
Also, one also shouldn't overlook some of the other potential drawbacks of Microdrives - such as incompatibilit
Compact Flash speed (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Compact Flash speed (Score:4, Informative)
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
Bla Bla (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bla Bla (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when has Moore's law anything to do with compact flash cards?
Re:Bla Bla (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bla Bla (Score:2)
Might as well save yourself the trouble... (Score:3, Funny)
CF will be Free After Rebates (Score:2, Informative)
Ugh. (Score:2)
Lordy thats alota pictures (Score:4, Informative)
Thats crazy number of pictures, hell, I have harddrives that are smaller than that CF card.
Holo cameras from Voyager (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Holo cameras from Voyager (Score:2)
Slashdot just gives me warm geek fuzzies sometimes...
Expensive today... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a good thing for all, even those that dont have the cash for a 12gb card...
Re:Expensive today... (Score:2)
This is a good thing for all, even those that dont have the cash for a 12gb card...
Meaning: another round of trickle-down electronics for everyone!
flashier gigs (Score:2)
all CF cards are not the same (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:all CF cards are not the same (Score:2)
For example, I believe the Canon Digital Rebel's CF slot can only write or read at 1x or 2x. So buying a 40x card doesn't help you when you're taking pictures.
It does however help you when you take the card out of the camera, and plug it into a usb2 card reader on your computer to get the 1.5gb+ of photos off...
Ok, Once and for all (Score:2)
This is about as far from true as possible, everyone is thinking of sports events and such like that. What about the pro photographers that arent in such accessable areas. Nature Photography anyone? How about some animals? Longer trips into the wilderness?
Now I am not agreeing that 12 gigs is needed for most anyone, but for thoes that go out on longer trips, out of cell ranger or where laptops are too heavy to cary with (backpacking, canoeing?), this is perfect. Its
there are better devices (Score:3, Informative)
here are several reviews of many varieties [steves-digicams.com]
Re:Ok, Once and for all (Score:2)
Re:Ok, Once and for all (Score:3, Interesting)
Future Shock (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
The latest MuVo2 Hitachi Microdrives DO NOT work. (Score:5, Informative)
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
Hitachi Drives... (Score:3, Informative)
However, that's not what I was going to mention...
Look at this image [tbreak.com] 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....
or... (Score:2)
Re:Usage (Score:2, Funny)
Hardly. I would need at least 13 pieces of 12G flash cards. For THAT money, I could buy a tiny bordello...
Re:Who? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Who? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Who? (Score:2)
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Who? (Score:2)
Cameras don't produce "1gig pictures" either, nor would such a camera be the target market for this device. Anything that produced data at that rate would be using very different storage than CF.
The purpose of such a large card is to enable shooting of an incredible number of images between card changes, probably in environments where card charges are difficult or "expensiv
Re:Who? (Score:2)
A printer such as a Durst Lambda can print a 50" wide roll of continuous photographic paper more than 100ft long in a continuous sheet at 300DPI with RGB lasers. The continuous tone images come out almost indistinguishable from photographs - the print shops with these machines can have them running jobs almost 24/7. The demand is the
Re:Who? (Score:2)
Re:video recorders (Score:2)
Re:video recorders (Score:2)
Re:video recorders (Score:2)
The limiting factor there really isn't the size of the CF card, it's the write speed of the CF card and the size of the camera's buffer. For instance, I have an old Olympus camera with an 8 MB card, enough to hold ~60 secords of video. However, I can only record in 15 second clips because it takes so long to transfer that to the card that the buffer fills.
Re:Speaking of Microdrives... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of Microdrives... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Price of the microdrive alone? (Score:2)
There was a
Re:CF HDD No longer Removable (Score:2)
Re:Compact Flash hard drives.... (Score:3, Insightful)