Darrell,
If I am reading this right then n*hand would allready be cheaper than
film according to Akira Kuwahara from Toshiba.
From techweb.cmp.com
<< Though SanDisk's head start in the market and the sheer weight of the companies supporting the
Miniature Card might appear overwhelming, Toshiba executives said SSFD is better suited to
low-cost consumer products, where Japanese and Korean vendors excel.
Toshiba intends to keep the cards in the $20 price range, initially offering 2 Mbytes by using a
16-Mbit NAND device. "By the year 2000, the SSFD cards will be able to store a megabyte of
information for 100 yen [about a dollar]," said Akira Kuwahara, general manager of Toshiba's
multimedia division. "At that point, silicon-based storage of photographs will be cheaper than
developed film."
The SSFD card measures 45 x 37 x 0.76 mm, is 0.76 mm thick and weighs just 1.8 grams, said
Kuwahara. Because it is essentially a single die overmolded into a plastic package, it will be
much cheaper to produce than the larger, metal-encased Miniature Card. "The SSFD structure is
very simple, and the cost can be lowered easily," he said.
Shozo Iijima, director of Fuji Photo Film Co., said Fuji will introduce a digital still camera using
the SSFD card this summer. "We need a small-size, low-cost medium for home-use cameras. If
a card that works like film is cheap enough, users can store the cards as is, without transferring
the image data to another storage device," he said.
Hideki Sato, managing director of Sega Enterprises in charge of game development, said the
card "brings a certain surprise element to the consumer because it is small, dramatically small.
That is an important point to attracting consumers. We are also considering using it in our arcade
games," where it would store data about a player's gaming history or add functionality to a game
that has grown stale.>> |
