tscales@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
<< Not cheap though. $479 from IBM's online store. Let's say they hold 20
shots, or even 40 compressed. If I was going to do a serious shoot, I'd
want what, maybe 8-10 of them? >>
Tom
I basically don't disagree here, the original post was talking more
about whether this was a possibility currently not whether it was cost
effective or how practical for a big shoot. Like most electronics if the
volume is there the price will come to a reasonable level in a few years, and
the capacity will increase according to something like Moore's law. If you
plot disc drive capacity over time it follows a pattern pretty similar to
Moore's law for semiconuctor devices where the density doubles every 18
months or so. The consumer pc hard drives went from 5-10Mb in the early 80's
to 20Gb today a factor of 4000 or so, maybe a bit faster than semis.
I think you may be a little pessimistic on the compression, even JPEG
can give quite high compression without too much loss in quality and some of
the more exotic fractal etc compression seem to be better. No doubt more
research on compression will help things still further. The advantage of
compression, if there is hardware support, is that the disc transfer is less
of a speed bottleneck.
Maybe writeable DVD disks with their 6-8GB capacity and higher write
speeds will become practical eventually. You could get your whole big shoot
on one. The idea of a more permanent medium than a hard drive is sort of
attractive although as has been discussed here previously the
longevity/availability of the readers is a big issue. Still pretty hard to
beat film in this area!
Regards,
Tim Hughes
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