*** Official HTF HD Formats Comparison Thread *See Post 957, p. 32* (1 Viewer)

[Stephen_J_H]

I concur. The earliest Best Picture winner I've seen is Wings, but between that and Ben-Hur, there's a bit of a gap in Best Picture winners I've seen and/or know about.

 

[Douglas Monce]

I don't think the price will be prohibitive in 3 or 4 years, and flash media seems to work perfectly fine in Cars, computers, DVD players, CD players, and just about every other consumer electronic device, and have for quite a few years.

I've been using flash media cards in cameras and for portable computer storage for a long while now and I've never had one fail.

Doug

 

[Chuck Anstey]

I don't know about the failure rates but what you can buy a BB for $10 used to cost >$200 just a few years ago. There is a tremendous push from the laptop manufacturers for flash memory drives to push the power consumption way down and less prone to damage from typical laptop treatment compared to HDD. HDM would be a secondary use of high capacity, low-cost CF type memory, not the driving force. Plus I think the last two years has shown that improved audio/video alone is not enough to push the general consumer toward a format. There must be a secondary advantage and CF has several practical advantages over optical media once the costs and storage are comparable.

After this format war fiasco, I don't see the studios supporting another A/V format for many many years to come unless everyone has a new portable "iHT" or whatever and people are screaming for content in preference to their home system. So I don't think it will matter what fantistically great technology Toshiba comes up with in the next five years for HDM unless the cost to manufacture software is effectively zero but I hope they try anyway.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I agree that a flash memory HDM won't happen anytime soon, if ever at all. Yeah, you can get *slow* flash cards very cheaply nowadays, but the stuff that's fast enough to handle HDM bitrates are still quite expensive (and are primarily used by pro photogs and maybe a few HD videocam enthusiasts). You'd probably need 30GB versions of those ultra-fast flash cards to come down to the

 

[Douglas Monce]

Honestly I think the demand for high speed flash memory will only increase. I've already seen the price of a 4 gig compact flash card go from over $200 about a year ago to one I bought at Christmas time that was $40. I really believe that solid state is the future.

Doug

 

[Chuck Anstey]

I guess you haven't been keeping up with HD video cams. It is likely that the latest HD cams announced at CES2008 will be the last HDV on tape. Tape based HDV is limited to 1440x1080p and 25Mbs MPEG2. Memory based HD cams have no such limitation and are full 1920x1080p. Tape has been winning in quality over CF and HDD cams only because AVC on-the-fly encoding with the CPU power an HD cam can contain wasn't really great. That is changing rapidly and possibly this year with the new 17Mbs AVC encoding on the latest cameras. We are still waiting for the test results of the actual products.

Laptops are all about less and more. Less power, less heat, less size, less cost and more capability. CF storage meets 3 of those 5 requirements over HDD and those three are the most important.

The by-product of these two forces is CF cards for digital SLRs that can hold months worth of pictures for very little money and MP3 players that can hold thousands of songs and run on a single AA battery for 20 hours.

Industry is always trying to find new ways to cram technology into everything, even when it isn't needed or justified. That push will only increase demand for smaller, better, faster, and lower power.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

I'm looking at the end of your post and thinking of two Daft Punk songs: Harder Better Faster Stronger and Technologic. Go figure.

 

[Patrick Sun]

The sober truth currently as BD attempts to scale the mountain that is DVD:

Slashdot Poll

 

[Douglas Monce]

The new AVCHD codec is getting mixed reviews. It apparently shows a fair number of motion artifacts, and if you shoot 24p it does very strange stuff with motion stutter. HDV still seems to be the better codec for now.

Doug

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

I don't know where you were shopping, but I only noticed roughly halving of prices each year (for comparable speed, brand name flash), not the $200-to-$40 drop you mention there. I paid ~$55 each for pretty fast (though not fastest) 2GB CF a little more than 2 years ago (when I upgraded to my Nikon D200 DSLR). Now, the 4GB version of that same CF costs ~$55 at Buy.com (where I originally bought the 2GB ones) and most other places -- though I just noticed that B&H and Adorama have it for $40, so that's probably the new price going forward. Of course, I'm looking at CFs at prices where diminishing returns per $ (for the consumer) aren't impacting the net cost, which is what you'd probably want to consider when it comes to HDM uses.

So we're talking a net price drop (from a theoretical ~$110 to ~$40 for 4GB) of ~65% over 2 years. I don't know about you, but considering that, 30GB would theoretically cost ~$300 right now. And if it only drops by ~65% over the next 2 years, it'll still cost ~$100. And then, after 4 years, it'll still cost ~$35. You'd have to ramp up the price reduction big time to get that 30GB down to $5-10 w/in 4 years. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I do think it's highly doubtful we'll get there before 4 years are up.

_Man_

 

[Chuck Anstey]

Doug, where are you seeing the in-depth reviews about the new 17Mbs AVC? The cameras I am most interested in are the new Canon HF series because Canon has been the leader in video quality at the consumer level. The old HG10 and HR10 could not compete with the HR20 HDV so I am waiting impatiently.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

True that. So ok, let's just say the demand for faster, cheaper flash memory won't slow down. But I still don't see HDM-capable 30GB+ flash being ready for the market in less than 4-5 years (as I showed in my last post).

BTW, I'm not sure flash will be the answer for actual laptops, if you mean to completely replace harddrives. Last I checked, bloatware is still growing faster than flash memory capacity, so that's not gonna happen. I had thought microdrive tech could replace regular harddrives for laptops though a quick search for pricing doesn't come up w/ anything to suggest that anymore. Whatever happened to Hitachi's couple-year-old(?) claim about increasing capacity by an order of magnitude? Anyway, I can definitely see flash do well for advancing PDA-type devices along w/ MP3/portable-video players, etc., but I have my doubts about actual laptops.

As for photo storage, actually, I'm not too sure everyone wants super large flash cards for their cameras. At some point, it can become unwieldy to deal w/ so many photos stored on a card while not really having enough space for permanent storage. Obviously, some folks will still want that, but most enthusiasts (and serious shooters) will want to transfer their photos off the card every now and then anyway. I have a 2-yo 10MP Nikon D200 that can machine gun at 5 fps (and the new D300 is only 2MP higher though it can do ~8 fps, LOL), and I shoot RAW+JPEG, which yields ~160 shots on each of my 2GB CFs, but I already find 2GB to be plenty most times -- though I often carry 3x2GB w/ me. People who don't bother to shoot RAW would get waaaay more shots (like 3x as many) per card than me, and people who'd actually want to keep all their pics on one card w/out transfering to some other permanent/archival storage would probably shoot at much lower quality too and get an order of magnitude extra capacity than that.

In the end, faster, larger flash memory are not needed (nor desired) at all for mainstream photo uses. But yes, if the video side does indeed take off, then I can see the demand for that...

_Man_

 

[Douglas Monce]

Right now I'm looking at an add a 16gig high speed compact flash card for $68. This one happens to be an 80x or 12mb/s card.

If truly mass production goes into effect as would be required for movie delivery, and that seems to be what Toshiba is working on, the price could come down quite significantly.

Doug

 

[Chuck Anstey]

That is why I said it was a by-product for DSLR, not that DSLR needs are the driving force for faster and larger cards.

Dell already ships laptops with CF type hard drives from Samsung but Samsung isn't giving up on ultra small HDD either.

 

[Marc Colella]

ouch!

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

True that though that would already be needed if we used my previously posted trend for estimates. The other thing is exactly how likelihood would Toshiba gamble big so soon again on HDM (via flash isntead) given how things went w/ HD DVD? For one thing, they'd be waaaay behind Blu-ray by the time it can come to market. For another, it would probably need to appeal to the masses immediately and by-pass the usual early adopter market because of that. I certainly have no desire for HDM on flash going forward. Do you? And can Toshiba convince all the studios to jump on board, assuming Blu-ray doesn't fail badly?

On 2nd thought, I suppose if Blu-ray does end up being niche or semi-niche, there could be a mass market for a lower quality HDM on flash that can get to market faster than something that competes directly w/ Blu-ray, eg. something that can supplant DVD and stave off VOD/downloads I suppose. Maybe they could try for a half capacity, half bandwidth, lower quality HDM on flash (ie. something comparable to current HD movie broadcasts) since that might be good enough to satisfy most average consumers.

_Man_

 

[Douglas Monce]

This was an Adata card. I don't know too much about that brand. 12mb/s is at the high end of the consumer rated cards. Sandisk is making some professional compact flash cards that are about 45mb/s. They are quite a bit more.

Another advantage is that pressing of a new movie onto a flash card is just a matter of data transfer. No glass master needs to be made (I'm assuming they still make glass masters)

When going from producing one movie to another, the production line wouldn't even have to stop. The data stream would just be changed from one program to another. And hundreds of cards could be flashed at once.

Doug

Edit: Oh also, instantaneous playback. No need to load anything into memory because the delivery device IS the memory.

 

[Jesse Blacklow]

Slashdot? Their readers and staff have been anti-HD formats (and particularly anti-Blu-ray) from the beginning. Not to mention, they are pretty much the opposite of normal consumers.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Actually, I don't know if that helps much, if at all. If they go w/ flash, I don't think they'll be transfering the movie into the card *after* manufacturing the card. Getting fast, reliable results that way might end up being more costly than doing hard pressings of optical media. They'd probably have to either find a way to transfer movies onto the flash memory more directly as part of the manufacturing process *OR* develop a way to fabricate the flash memory units w/ the data already stored onboard by default.

_Man_

 

[Douglas Monce]

I'm not totally sure that you can do that. Could be but I don't know enough about the process to know for sure. My feeling is that the data would be put on the cards after they are manufactured.

Doug