16 gig cards "very soon"

Blaine said:
I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for my MacPlus. Price tag = $600. $30/MB. I recently bought a 1GB memory stick to transfer media between computers. Price tag = $19 after mail in rebate. Even with the "new" math that's an incredible difference. Now, I will grant you that it has been 15 years.

Applying Moore's law, price of memory should halve every 18 months so in 15 years it should have halved 10 times or about to 1/1000.
So the price of "memory stick" seems to be quite fine.
But what about price of p2? It's about 175$/GB. So its price is 6 years behind of "memory stick".
 
toke lahti said:
Applying Moore's law, price of memory should halve every 18 months so in 15 years it should have halved 10 times or about to 1/1000.
So the price of "memory stick" seems to be quite fine.
But what about price of p2? It's about 175$/GB. So its price is 6 years behind of "memory stick".

It has nothing to do with the memory, CAPACITY. It's a RAID, so you get the FASTEST data throughput (100 mb/sec?). SD memory can't sustain a fraction of these read/write speeds.

That's what you're paying for. A minitaure firehose of bits.
 
CineAlta,
It _is_ a memory and has nothing to do with capacity. Raid chips are cheap, sd chips are cheap. It's about manufacturing volume and profits.
 
THOMSON Infinity will record directly to a memory stick and to any external 7200RPM firewire drive.
I saw a power point presentation of the product here in Israel and they were very proud of this feature.
After the presentation I had a little chat with the European product manager of THOMSON GRASS VALLEY and he confirmed it

He also told me that a low cost "1/3" HD cam is also in their plans for the future.
 
Ran said:
THOMSON Infinity will record directly to a memory stick and to any external 7200RPM firewire drive.
Ran, obviously the Thomson Infinity can record to SD because it only records in paltry DV, JPEG 2000 & MPEG-2 data streams (all highly compressed).

Let's see the Infinity try and record DVCPro HD, Pro 50, or Pro (all with high data throughputs) to SD card.

Well, if you want to settle for lowly MPEG-2, I guess the Infinity's media is cheaper than P2. It's like comparing apples & oranges. Definitely, a Volkswagen is cheaper than a Porsche.

Now, if the Viper records to SD cards, that would be a different story!
 
CineAlta said:
There's no way Panasonic (an acquisition company) would get into the solid state memory business. All the solid state memory companies would eat their lunch.

Umm... I'd guess acquisition is a fairly tiny part of panasonic's business, it's a pretty HUGE company, and one known to be on of the cutting edge SD memory "manufacturers". Now, how all this relates to ownership of the actual manufacturing facility ansd the rest of Matsushita I'm not sure, but suffice it to say Panasonic is highly involved in the solid stater memory business and certainly has many exclusive cutting-edge SD card products.

e.g.,
Sicilia, Italy– July 7, 2005 - Panasonic, the leading brand by which Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. is known announced that it is expanding its Panasonic SD Memory Card line up, with the addition of three new SD Memory Cards. The flagship model is the 2GB SD Memory Card (up to 20MB/s data transfer rate) in the “PRO HIGH SPEED” Series. The other models include the 1GB SD Memory Card (up to 5MB/s data transfer rate) in the “HIGH SPEED” Series, and the 512MB miniSD™ Card (up to 2MB/s data transfer rate) in the miniSD Card line up.

The SD Memory Card has become the de facto standard memory card format. Its applications are expanding to a vast range of digital products including Digital Still Camera (DSC), Digital Video Camera (DVC), PDA, mobile phone, digital audio player, etc. Due to these diverse applications, the speed performances required for the SD Memory Card have been diversified as well, according to the kind of products used by consumers. To better serve these diverse consumer needs, Panasonic is expanding its SD Memory Card and miniSD Card line up by adding the three new models, thus offering consumers wider choices that can meet their varying needs and budgets.


Also, see http://www.mobiletechreview.com/tips/PNY_Panasonic_SD_cards.htm for an interesting comparison of SD cards - Panasonic's (the ones in the article) are optimized for WRITE speed, and much, much faster at writing than competing brands tested.
 
ullanta said:
Umm... I'd guess acquisition is a fairly tiny part of panasonic's business, it's a pretty HUGE company, and one known to be on of the cutting edge SD memory "manufacturers". Now, how all this relates to ownership of the actual manufacturing facility ansd the rest of Matsupoo pooa I'm not sure, but suffice it to say Panasonic is highly involved in the solid stater memory business and certainly has many exclusive cutting-edge SD card products.

e.g.,
Who is "Matsupoo pooa?" I've never heard of that company. I agree Panasonic is very involved in SD memory. Indeed, they were one of the 3 founders of the SD memory association (along with SanDisk and Toshiba). But I really doubt, Panasonic owns chip foundries to manufacture memory. Perhaps, Matsusheta Electric does, but I doubt Panasonic. It would make more sense, if Panasonic bought SD memory from a SD memory company, eg SanDisk. Wouldn't it?
 
No, the other way round! Panasonic is BIG. Really big! And primarily a consumer-product company. I imagine it's more likely they sell to companies like SanDisk than vice-versa. Not that I'm sure... but I'm sure Panny does a lot of chip-level manufacturing.
 
JPEG2000 is a fantastic format and I think the Infinity can do really high rates.

P2 is raid using SD. But you have to offload somewhere WHILE you are shooting. Portable solutions use 2.5inch hard disk drives (laptop and anything else). Those disks only write 15 to 30mb/sec and half that for verify I believe (7.5mb/sec to 15mb/sec). 12.5mb/sec is real time, so you don't get any really impressive speeds at 1080p. If you verify, it is not better than using DV tape and you don't get to watch the footage while doing it. The Infinite Rev media does about 14mb/sec and you don't have to offload because you can have many (really cheap). It's not that slow:)
 
CineAlta said:
Ran, obviously the Thomson Infinity can record to SD because it only records in paltry DV, JPEG 2000 & MPEG-2 data streams (all highly compressed).
Infinity does not use SD cards but CF cards. Maybe only Revs are used for sometimes and CF's in the future when they are faster.
And AFAIK it can record jpeg2000 at datarate of 100Mbps, which gives much better quality than dv100.
And it records 10bit colors!
 
limo991 said:
JPEG2000 is a fantastic format and I think the Infinity can do really high rates.
toke lahti said:
Infinity...can record jpeg2000 at datarate of 100Mbps, which gives much better quality than dv100.
And it records 10bit colors!
Okay, I stand corrected on the Infinity and JPEG 2000. Thanks for the info.
 
Been thinking a bit about 16 Gig cards and I think they will be out as fast as Panasonic can get them to the market place.

What is the number one gripe about P2? The cards are not big enough! panasonic are losing sales because shooters are looking at the HVX200, liking it, but "hang on a minute, I can only get 4 or 8 minutes on one of these cards? Thanks but no thanks, I'll think I'll wait a year or two!".

To get this camera to sell in the amount Panasonic need to make good money, the P2 cards need to be bigger. And bigger very, very quickly. People don't want 4 Gig or 8 Gig cards, that cost a small fortune and will be cluttering up the backs of their desk drawers in a years time alongside those 16 meg flash cards. Their depreciation will be faster than buying a Skoda.

I don't expect to see 16 Gig cards in the next couple of months, but certainly by the summer they should start showing up, relatively expensive at first, but soon coming down in price to a level most of us will be willing to pay.
 
toke lahti said:
CineAlta,
It _is_ a memory and has nothing to do with capacity. Raid chips are cheap, sd chips are cheap. It's about manufacturing volume and profits.

I've read the entire thread (but probably have not absorbed it entirely) . . . what is a raid chip?
 
Raid chips in computing provide with the ability to stripe or mirror 2 or more physical storage units wether these are hard disks or flash-type memory, sd cards etc..
 
What is raid -

What is raid -

traditionally used in computer servers. There are many levels/types, but to over-simplify:

Instead of one storage device, it is several storage devices connected in parallel, so the data goes to all of them simultaneously. I suspect current solid-state memory is not fast enough (to store data) so pani is using RAID, which will allow a part of the data to go to multiple storage chips at the same time. One chip can't handle the load, but if you split it up and send it an array of them, it works!

Software and/or hardware can control how the data is stored.

One thing missing in this thread is the fact that the speed of solid-state is increasing. So, while Moore's law (doubling capacity every 18 months) may be real, we might be in for a good surprise when single chip can store the data quickly enough in the future. That would mean less chips in the P2, or the same number of chips, and much more memory. Still, we are years away from having this type of breakthrough, I believe.

-Jerry
 
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