16GB Flash Cards next year? Tape on the way out?

[Hulk]

Hi everybody! I've been away for a while. Busy, busy summer and moving into a new house shortly. Going to be doing lots of work, hardwood floors, finishing basement (studio of course), etc...

I noticed here that Samsung will be manufacturing 16GB Flash Cards next year. Assuming these cards, or even the 8GB and 4GB varieties that will surely appear, come down in price quickly, we could finally be looking at a good replacement for tape I think.

16GB, even at the HDV 25mbps 1080i data rate will be good for over an hour of video per card. I remember we had this discussion a while back when even 1GB card prices were astronomic, now that a 4GBcard can be had for $300 it seems reasonable cameras may be entering the market soon. Even using a $300 4GB card will get you almost 20 minutes of DV, or HDV 1080i. I would opt for a Compact Flash camera now if a good 3CCD model were available.

I wonder if the tape manufacturers have the ability to slow this transition?

For some reason the only card based cameras thus far have pretty much been consumer cameras, not high quality optical devices.

What do you think?

Mark

[Marshmallowman]

So do those new flash cards have enough speed to keep up?, well I guess it looks like solid state storgae is finally becoming a possibilty for most applications...yay

[Hulk]

Most of the newer CF cards will read/write at least 6MB/sec or faster. Less than 4MB/sec is required for 25mbps DV or HDV 1080i stream.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup. IMO why go with tape, which is fragile and the drives complex, when you can just use plug in a card and go? Not to mention that with fast flash memory "captures" could be done at faster than realtime.

I for one am looking forward to working that way.

[Brian Ellis]

Put it this way.
A flash card camera will be ~$30 cheaper (no tape drive) and mechanically more robust. If I was a family man going on 2 week's holiday, I would want to have with me ~5 hours of recording media, so the choice is 5 tapes at $3 each or 4 cards at $500 each. The tapes are ideal for archiving, as well, but the memory cards aren't unless you're a millionaire (and would require refreshing every 6 months or so with a power-up). That means you have the additional cost of, say, 50 Gb of HDD to archive your holiday, plus your time and bother. Then there is battery life. EEPROMS are hellishly greedy of power to burn, strangely more so than the two motors iin a drive. This is not noticeable in a digicam, with a capacity of a few hundred frames, but try the hundred-thousand frames of an hour's video and this is a horse of another colour.

Obviously, for pro use, the conditions are different, with belt batteries and more financial flexibility, not to mention that archiving on HDDs may be more acceptable.

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages in the near future, but I'll keep an open mind.

[Dr Mordrid]

Your example presumes existing technologies, which will not be the case by the time this is mass marketed.

Getting the notion of card storage into the accepted market mix is the idea, and low voltage/current storage methodolgies are already in the pipeline to take care of your specific reservaton.

Dr. Mordrid

[Mehen]

http://theinquirer.net/?article=26140

I know it's military, but still, 155GB!

[Hulk]

Brian,

Hi! Two things.

First, if the family in question has a laptop it's a simple matter to download the video day-by-day as you shoot, thereby eliminating the needs for more than 2 or 3 cards. Plus, the cards are of course reusable. And as Doc stated, quick downloads/editing. Plus we get rid of that damn tape transport, which I bet is the cause of 90% of camcorder repairs, if not more.

Second, where did you get the data regarding the power consumption of recording to tape vs. recording to CF? With all due respect I really find that hard to believe, especially when you add in a few rewinds and fast-forwards of the tape. Of course I don't have any hard data so I could very well be wrong in my assumption!

Mark

[Brian Ellis]

If you have to take a laptop on holiday as well as the camcorder... The latter can be even smaller than the existing range (to hell with camera shake!) but 4 or 5 kg of relatively unreliable, expensive and hellishly bulky laptop just to receive a day's holiday video? PLEEEEEZE!

EEPROMs work by sending a relatively high voltage, high current pulse through what is effectively a fuse. A "blown" fuse represents one state, whereas an intact one the other. What happens is that a voltage multiplier steps up the volts to charge a capacitor which is discharged into the fuse circuit, in the form of a matrix. This is why EEPROMs are so slow, compared with RAMs. For this kind of application, you would have to blow one helluva lot of fuses every second, su multiple circuits would be necessary, working in parallel, even with a RAM buffer.

Of course, I'm aware that EEPROMs are reusable (the second E means erasable).

I still think we are well away from a prosumer quality camera appearing; I'd hazard a guess that it's at least 2 - 3 years away. And I'd guess the mags will review it very unfavourably because of the price of memory chips (remember how they slammed into mini-DV at first because tapes were 15 bucks a go?).

[Hulk]

My point is that if someone is going to be shooting so many hours of video on a vacation then they are probably the type of person that would be taking a laptop with them.

Also, now that I think about it, with CF camcorders, basic in-camera editing would be a good possibility at the end of the day. Simply removing unwanted footage (misnomer with CF I guess) would create lots of room on the card.

As for the difference in power requirement of a tape transport vs. CF, we still don't know actual values.

2-3 years, huh? Sounds like a pretty good estimate.

Of course I'm hoping it's more like next year when we start seeing the first serious examples, that being the same camcorder offered in both a tape and tapeless format.

Mark

[DarrenD]

I have to take issue with Hulk and side with Brian on this. I am taking my camcorder to Disney Florida in 2 weeks (once in a lifetime holiday for my family) and will be taking our 8 Mini-DV tapes just in case we need them all. If I need more I'll have to buy some. I do not own a laptop and one that would have 150Gb of SPARE hard disc space would be quite expensive.

I am sure we all appreciate the benefit of solid state over tape but the costs are too prohibitive at the moment to be feasible for Joe Public. For professionals and people with money to burn good luck to you.

[Hulk]

Darren,

Good point. Obviously there are two sides to this, that's why I initiated the discussion. I'm wondering "what the facts are."

This is all going to depend on how big and how cheap the CF cards get, and how quickly it happens. I guess I'm really looking forward to this because I generally don't let the tape roll, I pick and choose my spots to record, and usually end up with 15 minutes of tape for a day of shooting. Unless I'm covering an event that need tip to tail coverage of course.

I'm just so looking forward to doing away with the tape transport.

Mark

[Sasq]

as someone who wants to get into underwater HD video, the CF idea interests me greatly. just on size and portability.
however I understand brians point, even while I use a 20gb portable drive for my cam and cam/vid shots the media is still expensive, I think 2~3 or even 4 years before CF media is cheap enough.

[Dr Mordrid]

Solid state media isn't limited to just CF etc. Other options, including holographic memory cards and MRAM (magnetic ram), are on the horizon and will offer similar benefits (simplicity, speed etc.) and have very high potential to be cheaper than traditional memory storage after their R&D is fully amortized.

Dr. Mordrid

[Marshmallowman]

MRAM has been on the horizon for 20 years

But yeah solid state storage is "almost" here