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Several sites are announcing the production of read only 'matix' memory cards by Sandisk. They imply the cards will be cheap enough to beome the new 'film' and talk of lasting 100 years.
If this turns out to be true, it really is a huge breakthrough. Considerably smaller than a 35 mm. film cannister and probably holding a lot more images, if the price really is reasonable and if the technology really is both reliable and archival - we could well see a drastic simplification of backups - you'd simply copy the cards to your portable drive or laptop or home computer, then file away the card for a rainy day.
Of course in one way it would spoil one of the advantages of digital in that it costs nothing to experiment, to give yourself several images from which to choose and could make shooting 10 images as you adjust focus for future blending or 24 images for subsequent stitching problematic.
With a 1D camera, they hold both CF cards and SD cards so perhaps you could save all images to one card and 'burn' the good images to the read only memory card. It would mean doing the editing in camera rather than later, but with the 3 inch LCD and magnification in the new cameras, that might be practical. It would leave the other cameras in the lurch though.
One wonders if what will happen is that the price will be low enough for use in special circumstances but not for routine shooting - only time will tell.
5 comments:
What a clever way to create a new and re-occurring market for a well-used product. Seems to me more a step backwards as far as functionality. As well, long-term storage of these small cards could be a real headache. Perhaps we'll get a reader with multiple slots (dozens?) in order to access and store more than one card at a time.
Since the current crop of CF cards are so inexpensive ($30-$50 per gig for the pro series) and are good for many years of service, these new read-only cards will have to be priced very low. Anything more than a few dollars per gig will be too much, but I'm reserving final judgment until I see the details.
It will depend on the cost - if it's equivalent to current film prices - less than a dollar a shot for the highest resolution cameras, it might be an option for a few. For it to be practical, it would need to be less or people will simply continue using resusable cards and backing up to extra hard disks.
Given the cost of chips in very large numbers (think RFID chips for breakfast cerial), it wouldn't be inconceivable that a 1 gig card could cost less than $5 - on my 1Ds2 that holds approximately 50 raw images - it might be worth it not to have to deal with iffy DVD backups.
Knowing how incredibly anal we all are about backups we wouldn't rely solely on a memory card for storage, would we? One could almost argue that at today's prices it would not be unreasonable to use our re-useable cards as permanent storage, but we'd still want multiple redundant backups. I think the technology is cool but does it really gain us much?
It all comes down to cost and reliability. Film costs anything from $.25 per shot up to several dollars for 4X5 colour film, particularly if you include the cost of processing. Reliability of film is superb - the only real issues are being unable to find an old slide or possibly water damage from poor storage, both of which are effort dependent. Clearly the memory cards would have to be darn reliable and competitively priced - the price might well pan out, whether the reliabilty will remains to be seen.
I personally, would balk at the idea- I like the fact that my cards are reuseable- I think the only people who could really use this technology are the company execs that would undoubtably profit from them. Think APS....
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